World of Wonders, the final novel in Robertson Davies’s Deptford Trilogy, is a dazzling and unsettling exploration of performance, power, and self-creation. Presented here in the Penguin Classics edition with an introduction by Wayne Johnston, the novel centers on Paul Dempster—magician, filmmaker, and master illusionist—as he recounts his extraordinary life. Moving from provincial Canada to the dark glamour of European cinema, Davies blurs the boundaries between truth and artifice, myth and autobiography. Johnston’s introduction offers an illuminating appreciation of Davies’s narrative daring and theatrical imagination, situating World of Wonders as both a culmination of the trilogy and one of Davies’s most psychologically daring works.
About the Author
Robertson Davies (1913–1995) was one of the most accomplished novelists of the twentieth century and a towering figure in Canadian literature. Educated at Queen’s University and Oxford, Davies built a career that spanned journalism, theatre, publishing, and academia, eventually serving as Master of Massey College at the University of Toronto. His fiction is distinguished by its intellectual playfulness, psychological insight, and deep engagement with myth, Jungian psychology, and Western cultural tradition. Davies achieved international recognition with the Deptford Trilogy (Fifth Business, The Manticore, and World of Wonders), which remains his most widely read and critically admired body of work.
