Significant Things

by Helen McLean

Short-listed for the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize Best Book Award, Caribbean and Canada Region

A man of innate taste and discrimination, Edward has become an art dealer and collector of fine antiques and paintings. During his first six idyllic years he was the centre and focus of his mother's existence. Betrayals and unhappiness in subsequent years have led him to form almost fetishistic attachments to beautiful objects, as a substitute...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1550024418
• ISBN13: 9781550024418
• Release Date: April 2003
• Publisher: Dundurn Press
• Length: 260 Pages
• Weight: 0.63 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.6" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

Wonderful study of elegant collector and art dealer

This book follows the life of an art dealer and antiques collector from his difficult economic but secure emotional beginnings in Toronto to his move to England as the stepson of a wealthy manufacturer and back to private school in Toronto. It then covers his development in England and Canada as a connoiseur and collector of fine objets and as a person with thwarted needs and desires. McLean's prose is elegant and her painterly descriptions wonderful and entrancing. The reader goes through just about every emotion with the character, and as an observer. It is impossible to put down, and one is sad to see it end. This is as good a story, and as well-written as any by McLean's contemporaries.