The Gilded Beaver
by Margaret Lindsay HoltonPublish: Jun 07, 2020Contemporary Romance New Adult Romance Romance Historical Fiction Women's Fiction Literary Fiction Biographies & Memoirs History General Nonfiction BusinessBook Overview
- What happens when an aspiring designer meets up with a big-wig financier? -Winner of the Hamilton Literary Awards in 1999, ‘The Gilded Beaver by Anonymous’ has been updated in 2020 to reveal the author’s true identity.
Award-winning Canadian artist, Margaret Lindsay Holton explains, “I am free now from a decades-long agreement to hold-my-tongue until ‘one of us dies.’ The previously undisclosed client, ‘G’, passed on in March of this year in his 80th year. I can now claim this ‘story’ as my own.”
In this quasi-fictionalized account, Canadian fine furniture designer, Iris Ann Burdock, is introduced to one of Toronto’s financial-elite executives, Luke G. Henderson. He considers her, as well as a commission. The problem, for Iris, is that her recently-divorced client is moody and unpredictable. Iris must excavate his carefully-crafted façade to find the ‘real man’ in order to rise up to meet his design challenge. A witty and frustrating exchange erupts between them. Romantic sparks fly.
As the battle-of-wills escalates, Iris’s meticulous design efforts are contrast to her meandering solo sojourns to a 25-acre bush property in the backwoods of Muskoka. There, quiet reflection makes her question, again and again, what really matters …
Critical Reviews from 1999:
" ... like good wine - rich, complex, pleasingly acerbic ... a dance of intellect & eros that expertly unfolds ... and closes with panache." - Jim Bartley, Globe & Mail, Toronto
"... a psycho-sexual tug of war in the world of design" - Spring Book Review, Globe & Mail, Toronto
"... Novels about the relationship between two brothers, mothers and sons, husbands and wives, or fathers and daughters are common. But the relationship between a fine furniture designer and an imperious client can be just as fraught with tension, drama, comedy, incomprehension and hurt as any family relationship, and this novel proves it. - Why the 'anonymity'? Because, quotes the author, 'This is a true story’… " – The Toronto Star
