In this tenth book in Hugh Hood's highly acclaimed series, The New Age, two linked novellas explore the transforming powers of love. In the first novella Matthew Goderich discovers that his late Uncle Philip has had a secret and emotionally rewarding romantic life. In the second novella Matthew nurses his childhood friend, Adam, through a long, painful, and terminal AIDS-induced illness. Matthew, in the first novella, is the detached observer and dogged detective who comes to understand love; in the second, he finally becomes fully engaged with the emotion of loving as he rids himself of his homophobia and learns to appreciate and embrace Adam, his lifelong friend. Matthew's emotional awakening corresponds with society's growing awareness in the early 1980s of the nature and extent of the AIDS crisis. Dead Men's Watches continues Hugh Hood's vivid portrayal of Canadian social history and teaches us that the gift of love is all that matters in the end.

SAVING ONE LIFE IS LIKE SAVING THE WHOLE WORLD Half-sisters Kathryn Frasier and Cece Goldman stumble into another mystery in this second book in the Watch series. When a former acquaintance of Kathryn's is accused of murder, she and Cece go on a mission to prove his innocence by finding the real killer. But things are never what they seem in this tangled web, and Kathryn's spunky determination to solve the mystery pushes her closer and closer to a deadly climax.

After witnessing a gangland assassination, Jack Slade must escape the assassins wearing only swimming trunks, shirt, and sandals, with no money and no ID. Arriving in a strange town, he rescues a woman from rapists and goes to work in her gambling hall and whore house as a bouncer. He is recruited by a crime boss, and rises to be a top operative in the local underworld. Fists and bullets fly, however, when he revolts against his employer. Blood flows and dead bodies pile up as he cuts a red swathe through the criminal underworld.

This book was written to venture beyond interpretations of Cormac McCarthy's characters as simple, antinomian, and non-psychological; and of his landscapes as unrelated to the violent arcs of often orphaned and always emotionally isolated and socially detached characters. As McCarthy usually eschews direct indications of psychology, his landscapes allow us to infer much about their motivations. The relationship of ambivalent nostalgia for domesticity to McCarthy's descriptions of space remains relatively unexamined at book length, and through less theoretical application than close reading. By including McCarthy's latest book, this study offer the only complete study of all nine novels. Within McCarthy studies, this book extends and complicates a growing interest in space and domesticity in his work. The author combines a high regard for McCarthy's stylistic prowess with a provocative reading of how his own psychological habits around gender issues and family relations power books that only appear to be stories of masculine heroics, expressions of misogynistic fear, or antinomian rejections of civilized life.