A

Summary

Andre Alexis has described his fictional terrain as “the shifting ground between the imagined life and the life that you live in from day to day.” There’s no better representation of this than the compelling narrative in A, where Alexander Baddeley, a Toronto book reviewer, is obsessed with the work of the elusive and mythical poet Avery Andrews.

Following in the footsteps of countless pilgrims throughout literary history, Baddeley tracks Andrews down, thinking that meeting his literary hero will provide some answers to his lifelong questions about creativity, art, and inspiration.

Though replete with mysticism and allusions to spirituality and the divine, Alexis’s writing in A manages to bring higher-level concepts down to the grassroots level, as the interactions between the two main characters results in a meditation and a revelation about the creative act itself that generates more and more questions about what it really means to be “inspired.”