World of Wonders

The third book in Robertson Davies's acclaimed The Deptford Trilogy, with a new foreword by Kelly Link

Hailed by the Washington Post Book World as "a modern classic," Robertson Davies’s acclaimed Deptford Trilogy is a glittering, fantastical, cunningly contrived series of novels, around which a mysterious death is woven. World of Wonders—the third book in the series after The Manticore—follows the story of Magnus Eisengrim—the most illustrious magician of his age—who is spirited away from his home by a member of a traveling sideshow, the Wanless World of Wonders. After honing his skills and becoming better known, Magnus unfurls his life’s courageous and adventurous tale in this third and final volume of a spectacular, soaring work.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.“If you are the kind of reader who looks for traces of the marvelous and the unexpected in narrative as well as daily life, then soon you will, like me, treasure these novels.”
—Kelly Link
 
“The Deptford Trilogy boldly commingles the extraordinary and the everyday, at times attaining what Davies once called, in talking about melodrama, ‘the compelling immediacy of a dream.’”
—Michael Dirda

"Robertson Davies is one of the great modern novelists."
—Malcolm Bradbury, The Sunday Times (London)

"Robertson Davies is a novelist whose books are thick and rich with humor, character and incident. They are plotted with skill and much flamboyance."
—The Observer (London) 

Robertson Davies (1913-1995) had three successive careers during the time he became an internationally acclaimed author: actor, publisher, and, finally, professor at the University of Toronto. The author of twelve novels and several volumes of essays and plays, he was the first Canadian to be inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Wayne Johnston is the author of several novels, including The Colony of Unrequited Dreams. He lives in Toronto.