Description
Fifth Business, which one critic said was "as masterfully executed as anything in the history of the novel," might be described simply as the life of a schoolteacher named Dunstan Ramsay. But such description would not even suggest the dark currents of love, ambition, vengeance, and death that flow through this powerful work, cast in the form of Ramsay's memoirs.
Fifth Business is the first novel in the celebrated Deptford Trilogy, which also includes The Manticore and World of Wonders—it also stands alone as the story of a rational man who discovers that the marvelous is only another aspect of the real.
"[An] enigmatic novel, elegantly written and driven by irresistible narrative force."
The New York Times