Mordecai The Life & Times

Foran's book is IT: the definitive, detailed, intimate portrait of Mordecai Richler, the lion of Canadian literature, and the turbulent, changing times that nurtured him. It is also an extraordinary love story that lasted half a century. The first major biography with access to family letters and archives. Mordecai Richler was an outsized and outrageous novelist whose life reads like fiction. Mordecai Richler won multiple Governor General's Literary Awards, the Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, among others, as well as many awards for his children's books. He also wrote Oscar-nominated screenplays. His influence was larger than life in Canada and abroad. In Mordecai, award-winning novelist and journalist Charlie Foran brings to the page the richness of Mordecai's life as young bohemian, irreverent writer, passionate and controversial Canadian, loyal friend and deeply romantic lover. He explores Mordecai's distraught childhood, and gives us the "portrait of a marriage" - the lifelong love affair with Florence, with Mordecai as beloved father of five. The portrait is alive and intimate - warts and all.

Richler embodied the complexity and appetite for life that he favoured in people and imbued in his greatest characters. Throughout five decades as a novelist, essayist, journalist and screenwriter, he wielded his inimitable satiric and comic genius. This vivid, sweeping story takes us from 1930s and '40s old-world Montreal to 1950s Paris-the equivalent of the "finishing school" that had similarly seduced Hemingway and Fitzgerald; from the easy, wild young artist's life in Ibiza and the south of France to London in the early '60s, where a handful of Canadians were helping mould the city's new culture. Finally Richler would return, with five children in tow, to the city so essential to him as a writer. Mordecai is also an extraordinary and moving love story: Richler's devotion to his beautiful wife Florence lasted more than forty years.