By Ed Macdonald
Atomic Storybook is a novel about a young painter named Owen who is regularly abducted by beings he calls “the space pricks.” These otherworldly visitors perform experiments on him, befuddle him with an absurd riddle about the moon, and show him scenes from his previous lives — one as a 12th century English monk; in another he shares the ward with Albert Einstein’s son, Eduard, in the Burghölzli mental hospital.
Through all of this, and his lengthy existential conversations with physics professor, Chesley Keeping, Owen comes to doubt the nature of everything around him — all that stuff most of us like to call “reality.”
Atomic Storybook is a new novel from the author of Spat the Dummy. It’s about the early years of Albert Einstein, an explosion on the moon, and a group of friends who feel like they are living in a long, strange dream. A delightful stew of lust, blood, ennui and physics, Atomic Storybook is also about living and dying in what is, undeniably, an illusion.
PRAISE FOR ATOMIC STORYBOOK
“Macdonald does an excellent job through multiple perspectives of keeping the reader on edge as to what is real and what is not. … It’s a barometer of excellent writing when a novel can get you to stop reading, causing you to daydream and get lost in one magnificently imagined scene.”
— THE WINNIPEG REVIEW
Ed Macdonald has written and produced many hours of television and has won three Gemini Awards for excellence in writing. He has been nominated numerous times. He has also won the prestigious Writers’ Guild of Canada Award and The Golden Sheaf Award. His novel Spat the Dummy was published in 2010 and was nominated for the QWF First Book award. A collection of his stage plays, Mutant Sex Party and Other Plays was published in 2012. Ed lives in Toronto.
