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.