Duddy McGill is a dreamer –a man who turns his back on reality so often he falls from one disaster into the next. Occasionally, he is given an opportunity, so when no one wants the job, Duddy is appointed the town’s temporary police chief. It’s only for a week but in the first day of the job, Duddy arrests Mrs. Truman Taylor for shoplifting. A prominent citizen, Mrs. Taylor is humiliated and horrified. She resists and ensuing struggle, a dance down Main Street to the jail, happens in front for the astonished townspeople. Unfortunately for Duddy, he has arrested the wrong woman.

He doesn’t have much better luck with Jugs Henderson, who sues him when she falls off her clothesline platform into the petunia patch, or with Mrs. Gordon McKenzie, a widowed schoolteacher who he ends up propositioning. Then there is Mary Lou Weaver, recently moved to Parrsboro because she always wanted to live by the sea. She definitely ends up looking at the water –stuck high above the ground in Duddy’s truck. No wonder Duddy has a few prospects and a very suspicious wife.

Finally, Duddy’s long-suffering wife Minnie has had enough. Out goes her husband and her old life. Yet despite it all, Duddy McGill tries to help people. He is the go-between for the man from Michigan, who has big plans to build a croquet factory in the town, and the local woman he has been searching for. Duddy really wants to do right. He assists his friends when possible. He builds a new deck for Royal after his friend suffers another tragedy and when Mink Martin goes to war with the bureaucracy, Duddy is there to help.

Duddy McGill is a man worthy of salvation. The problem is, he’ll have to do it himself. But fate has a way of intervening, of picking up a small-town guy and making him an international hero. Here is a story of love, absurdity and people with warm hearts. Few writers could make a funeral funny, but it happens here in this story of human folly where you’ll never stop laughing.

Carl Cocking had two worthy ambitions: to restore his father’s battered reputation and bring his mother and brothers to some agreement whereby they could call themselves a family. Tapestry of Green is the story of one Englishman who traces the last months of his father’s life through the dark streets of Victorian London to the sampans and opium dens of China. During a quest that he cannot abandon, Carl witnesses the brutality of British trading ships, the Great Trek by the Dutch in South Africa and the beginning of the Opium Wars.

The story takes place in England and China between 1837 and 1843, in the era when hot air and gas balloons were creating great interest in aviation. Artist and inventor Robert Cocking often took his young son Carl on balloon excursions over the English countryside and the city of London where they could look down on a world filled with great filth and great beauty. Carl escapes the unravelling of his family and only returns to London when his father makes aviation history by becoming the first Englishman killed in a parachute accident.

“He is the greatest fool in England, they wrote in their horrid penny papers, and I would not let my father be so remembered.”

Carl tries to reconstruct the last months of his father’s life. His investigation takes him through London’s gentlemen clubs and shabby tenements and on a voyage to the other side of the world to the one man who helped his father design his unique parachute. Carl arrives in China just as the Chinese are rebelling over British intrusions and the supplying of opium to the masses of Chinese.

“On the second day on the Canton River thousands of dead fish floated by, killed by white powder seeping into the water from smashed wooden chests.”

Although Carl is fictional, his father Robert and the Opium Wars are very real.

Bruce Graham is a Nova Scotia writer and former broadcaster who, for many years, was the face of the evening TV news in Maritime homes. He is the author of seven books, three of which have been transformed into stage plays. Ivor Johnson’s Neighbours is being developed into a television series. His last book, Duddy Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, was published in 2013, and is now being prepared for the stage. Bruce lives in his hometown of Parrsboro with his wife Helen.