Doctor Bloom's Story
by Don Coles
Alfred A. Knopf Canada
Doctor Bloom's Story is a masterful debut novel from a Governor General's Award-winning poet. A precise and ardent poet at the height of his craft, Don Coles has now turned his eye to fiction. Coles instinctively knows how to make every page count and he evenly engages his elegant and deeply evocative prose in Doctor Bloom's Story.
Doctor Bloom's Story is a story of keen intelligence, dry humour, and emotional depth that sparks an impossible moral dilemma. Following the death of his wife and only child, cardiologist Nicolaas Bloom sells his house and practice and leaves Europe for Toronto, where he hopes to begin a new life.
When a neighbour invites him to join his university writing class, Dr. Bloom accepts. Soon after he sees Sophie, a beautiful and enigmatic classmate, being struck by a man in a local park. He later learns that the man is her husband, and that she is regularly assaulted. Dr. Bloom and others who know Sophie as an intelligent, resourceful woman are surprised to learn that she will not leave her husband, and that she fervently believes there is a purpose for her suffering. Still, they are determined to understand both her passion and passivity, and to protect her, if they can.
Through a strange accident of circumstance, Sophie's fate comes to rest in Dr. Bloom's hands, and therein lies the dilemma: Can one life be taken with impunity if it saves the life of another?
Don Coles
Don Coles is one of Canada's most successful and respected poets. He has been writing for over 40 years and for 10 years he was the Senior Poetry Editor at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Coles has published 10 books of poetry, and won the Governor General's Award for Poetry for Forests of the Medieval World (1993), the Trillium Prize for Kurgan (2000), and the John Glassco Translation Prize for For the Living and the Dead (1996). Doctor Bloom's Story is his first novel. He lives in Toronto.
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