Sometimes those who have the most seem bent on throwing it away. Meet Bob Sterling, a comfortable middle-aged professor, a specialist in the life of Edgar Allan Poe, married to a former student with whom he has a young son. In the space of a week his family, marriage, career, sanity, and life are brought to the brink of ruin in the aftermath of a trip he makes with a student, the intense young poet Sienna Chu, who tweaks into florescence a long-harboured, secret sexual fetish. Then add to the mix the misadventures of his wife’s mentally failing mother, a shy night prowler, and Sienna’s explosive techno-junkie roommate. Poignant and gritty, tantalizingly erotic, Losing It is a high-wire act that plays out as a delicious blend of darkness and humour as it embraces the surprising emotional connections that are made in the midst of life’s madness.


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“Think Woody Allen meets Philip Roth meets American Beauty. The book is very funny and very dark.”
–Globe and Mail

“Cumyn proves himself a bravely original, assured storyteller.… Brilliant and moving.…”
–Maclean’s

“An amazing achievement.…I was swept up by Cumyn’s uncanny wisdom about the inside of the human mind, by his mesmerizing devotion to telling detail, by his vision of absurdity couched in lovable (or banal) ordinariness. Cumyn’s talent for fiction is absolutely original; it hits the reader (this one, at least) with the most refreshing and exhilarating shock.”
–Bronwyn Drainie

“Cumyn charges headlong into Kingsley Amis and Anthony Burgess country and stakes out a new place in it.…Cumyn is a fine writer.”
–Montreal Gazette

“A brilliant tour de force that pushes past the boundaries of expectation and predictability. Losing It is a funny, fascinating novel. . . . An irrepressible book.…”
–Globe and Mail

“Cumyn is a gifted writer who’s demonstrated command of a wide breadth of theme. He’s certainly deft at creating tautly entertaining and viscerally convincing portrayals of men and women twisted to the snapping point by their unwillingness to accept themselves as they are.”
–National Post

“With considerable flair, Cumyn has created a dysfunctional Canadian family tiptoeing toward chaos on stiletto heels.”
–Ottawa X Press

“[Cumyn] has an uncanny way of putting himself deep inside his characters’ heads.…He draws his characters beautifully.…A highly readable novel by a writer with dazzling ability.”
–Vancouver Sun

“The reader experiences a kind of emotional variegation: a bold stripe of comedy yields to a paler, frailer shade of poignancy.”
–Ottawa Citizen


From the Hardcover edition.

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Alan Cumyn’s books include Man of Bone (1998), winner of the Ottawa-Carleton Book Award (as it was then known) and a finalist for the Trillium Book Award in 1999; Burridge Unbound (2000), which won the Ottawa Book Award and was a finalist for The Giller Prize; Losing It (2001); and The Sojourn (2003). His children’s book The Secret Life of Owen Skye was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Children’s Literature (2002).

Alan Cumyn lives in Ottawa.


From the Hardcover edition.

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