Gentleman Death

Meet novelist Robert Fraser as he comes face to face with creativity, his mortality, and the deaths of his father and brother. Set mainly in Toronto, the novel also takes us to London, Scotland, Germany, and New York as we follow the escapades of two of Fraser’s fictional characters. There is Simpson, called into service as an anonymous sperm donor, and Dunbar, an enigmatic tourist in Berlin just before the Chernobyl disaster, where he meets the captivating Lena, with whom he begins to sense an almost forgotten freedom and elation. But at the centre of Gentleman Death is Robert Fraser’s own compelling story. Gibson juxtaposes reality and fiction in this compassionate, sometimes outrageous, often very funny exploration of the absurdities and alarms of aging, the nature of fiction itself, and the maturity that grows from reconciliation.

Graeme Gibson was born in London, Ontario, in 1934.

An important spokesman for Canadian cultural identity, Gibson was the initial organizer and a founding member of the Writers’ Union of Canada, and was its chairman in 1976. He was also an organizer and founding member of the Writers’ Trust, a non-profit organization, and was subsequently its chairman. From 1987 to 1989 he was president of the Canadian Centre of International PEN.

In 1990, he won a Toronto Arts Award for writing and publishing, and, in 1992 he received the Order of Canada. He is the author of four novels, Five Legs (1969), Communion (1971), Perpetual Motion (1982), and Gentleman Death (1993).

Graeme Gibson lives in Toronto, Ontario.