Prefaces & Afterwords

Interview with Steven Brown

I need to be up front about this. I did not until recently understand that Mr. Linden MacIntyre, of CBC’s the fifth estate fame, is also an accomplished, indeed a Giller Prize winning, novelist. The cave I live in, I have to say, is dark. Its walls are thick. News, including literary news, can have a hard time getting in. I should move or at least get out more. Leaving that aside it was a great pleasure bringing myself up to date on the works of Linden MacIntyre, novelist.
    
The provocatively titled Why Men Lie, just published, is the third installment of The Cape Breton Trilogy.  Preceded by The Long Stretch (1999) and The Bishop’s Man (2009 Giller) it focuses on a character we have already met in the previous two books, Effie MacAskill Gillis, ex-wife of both John Gillis and his brother Sextus Gillis, and sister to Duncan MacAskill, the priest central to The Bishop’s Man.  Now in middle age, a successful academic and scholar based in Toronto, Effie reconnects with another Cape Bretoner the reader has met fleetingly in the previous novels, J.C. Campbell, and begins an affair with him.  Complications, as they’re likely to, ensue.

Aside from the Giller Prize for fiction Linden MacIntyre has won the Gemini Award for excellence in broadcast journalism several times over.  He has also received a host of other awards for his fiction and non-fiction.  He is appearing at Incite with Vincent Lam at the Vancouver Public Library May 9.

Tell us about your book, Why Men Lie.

From a woman’s point of view, how men at middle age cope with declining self esteem and insecurities about masculinity. Inevitably they turn to women and, following a lifetime formula for winning the approval and reassurance of women in their lives --- manipulate by small and large deceptions.

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