From the author of The Ring Master, nominated for the Governor-General's Award, comes this novel autobiography - or autobiographical novel told in several variations. Caught between observation and imagination, the author tries six times to make his life into a novel using a variety of literary confidence devices.

Born into an aristocratic British family as William Le Breton Harvey Brisbane-Bedwell, the protagonist of the first variation supposedly meets Albert Einstein, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Amelia Earhart as a boy and witnesses American troops mustering for D-Day on the English coast. This story is abandoned, exposed as fiction, while the second variation places the protagonist in the US Navy, as a young pilot who crashes his plane into a volcano on Papua New Guinea that spews liquid gold, which is protected by tribes of cannibals who, in the next variation, a Jesuit priest attempts to convert.

Or so we are led to believe ...until the novelist becomes an internationally renowned ballroom dancer and spy in the Con Brio variation, who teaches the tango aboard a cruise ship with Margaret Thatcher and Noel Coward on board as VIP passengers. Or so we are led to believe in the final variation, on Liberation Day, as the author pays homage to his father, who was killed in the Italian campaign and was buried in a war cemetery in Forli. Taken together, the six aborted novels constitute a moral history of the 20th century.

Written in the self-reflexive tradition of Cervantes' Don Quixote, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Melville's The Confidence Man, and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, David Gurr is an unabashed charlatan, a literary confidence man who pushes at the borders of fiction and fact, art and reality to expose good and evil afoot in the world. That great charlatan, the devil, is not far behind.