A Thing You'll Never Do

A violin player obsesses over a former lover and his complicated relationship with his womanising father.When, over drinks, his new neighbour asks how he acquired a signed copy of Jimmy Carter’s memoir, Roman’s explanation begins not with his father, to whom the book is inscribed, but with Annie Moon, the young musician he met two decades before while stranded by a blizzard in a small Canadian town. Transfixed by her beauty and natural talent, Roman’s pursuit of the Korean violinist quickly turns into obsession—first his own, and then his father’s for the same woman. An elegant meditation on love, sex, and the complex relationships between fathers and sons, A Thing You’ll Never Do is a poignant examination of modern masculinity. David Gilmour won the 2005 Governor-General's Award for Fiction and was nominated for the prestigious 2013 Scotiabank Giller Prize. His books have been translated into dozens of languages and positively received by William S. Burroughs, Northrop Frye, Playboy, People Magazine, The New York Times, Maclean's, National Post, The Washington Post, The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal. A Thing You'll Never Do lives up to Gilmour's reputation as an elegant prose stylist and provocative writer. The book reflects on middle-aged masculinity by juxtaposing obsession and lust for a former lover with the caretaking of an elderly father-building to a surprising ending when these twin narratives meet.

About the Author :
David Gilmour is a novelist who has earned the praise of literary figures as diverse as William S. Burroughs and Northrop Frye, and publications ranging from The New York Times to People Magazine. His fourth novel, Lost Between Houses, was a national bestseller in 1999 and was shortlisted for the prestigious Trillium Book Award. Sparrow Nights, his fifth novel, was published in 2001 by Random House to excellent reviews in The Globe and Mail, The New York Times and Washington Post. His sixth novel, A Perfect Night to Go to China, won the 2005 Governor-General’s Award for fiction and has been translated into Russian, French, Thai, Italian, Dutch, Bulgarian, Turkish, and Serbian. The Film Club (2008) is a non-fiction account of what happened when he let his teenage son drop out of school — on condition that he watch three movies a week with his father. The Film Club has been translated into 24 languages so far, including Japanese, Icelandic, Chinese, and Catalan and was a bestseller in Germany, Brazil and Canada. David’s last novel, Extraordinary, was published by HarperCollins in September, 2013. David has two children and lives in Toronto. He currently teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Toronto.

Review :
Praise for David Gilmour “If someone put a gun to my head and forced me to commit the most literary of misdemeanors—naming a voice of my generation—I’d first ask, do you mean . . . that part of my generation that kept a light shining in the chamber of their sweetly flawed and sometimes sinful dreams? And if the answer was yes, I just know I’d blurt out, David Gilmour.”—Bob Shacochis, winner of the National Book Award "Rarely has a midlife crisis been so entertaining."—People Magazine "[How Boys See Girls] is everywhere about the pathos of sexualized seeing, and it has the fascinating effect of a lurid confession, which is to say that it seems true as well as self-punishing, insanely intense, funny and very serious." —New York Times “Heartfelt . . . more than once I was moved to tears.”—Douglas McGrath, New York Times Book Review “Mordantly hilarious and dazzlingly written . . . Even as Gilmour provides some of the familiar satisfactions—a caustically articulate narrator à la Humbert Humbert and an increasingly bleak and dangerous series of humiliating adventures—he also manages to put a new twist or two into it. . . Halloway may be a major league jackass, not to mention vandal and worse, but he’s a hugely entertaining one. As Humbert Humbert used to say, you can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”—Washington Post “Gilmour's prose has flashes of bright metaphor, and his dialogue is alert and alive. Darius is a believable aesthete—he's consumed with status, the impression he's making and the gnawing power of the past.”—New York Times Book Review "Gilmour tells this story with emotion but avoids, what in less talented hands would become, mawkish sentimentality. His spare poetic style makes Extraordinary a compelling novel.”—Publishers Weekly “[Gilmour’s] latest is sure to solidify his reputation as an edgy, intelligent author. This work offers a great deal of mordant wit, and the writing is consistently first-rate, layering memory, inner monolog, and fast-paced action. Recommended for all collections.”—Library Journal “With Sparrow Nights, David Gilmour joins the list of inspired modern monologists that begins with Dostoevsky and includes Sartre, Camus, Beckett, Thomas Bernhard and Céline . . . [Gilmour] is a brilliant stylist capable of an extraordinary range of effects.”—Boston Review “A masterpiece of irony, subversive humour and astonishing self-mockery . . . a beguiling book . . . Gilmour handles his material with style and finesse, with a delicious sense of irony and with a creative jouissance. Here is a novel that gleams with intelligence, humour and wickedly precise observation. Read it, and wince.”—Globe and Mail "Gilmour has created a classic or textbook anti-hero . . . And, as always, Gilmour writes in a clear, concise, lapidary prose. In a literary landscape littered with victims, interlarded with heroes, it is refreshing, for once, to spend time with a character as unrepentant as he is unpleasant; a real bad egg.”—David Eddie, National Post "In its riveting evocation of teenage angst, Lost Between Houses recalls J.D. Salinger's classic Catcher in the Rye . . . Funny, surprisingly moving."—Maclean's “David Gilmour’s voice is a charm. As with all of today’s best conversational prose stylists—think of names like Nicholson Baker, Julian Barnes, or John Banville . . . [Gilmour] has the relaxed, informal, intelligent but unpretentious manner down pat.”—Toronto Star