Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Best of 2024 ezine!

Beyond the Book: Background information when reading By the Time You Read This

Summary |  Excerpt |  Reviews |  Beyond the Book |  Read-Alikes |  Genres & Themes |  Author Bio

By the Time You Read This by Giles Blunt

By the Time You Read This

A Novel

by Giles Blunt
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (8):
  • Readers' Rating (1):
  • First Published:
  • Feb 6, 2007, 352 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Jul 2008, 352 pages
  • Rate this book

About This Book

Beyond the Book

This article relates to By the Time You Read This

Print Review

Giles Blunt was born in 1952 in Windsor, Ontario, and grew up in North Bay, Ontario. He describes his parents as being "so English that the space on their passports for citizenship could only be filled in" British Beyond Belief". He spent most of his education at a Catholic boys' school called Scollard Hall, moving to a "regular school", Algonquin Composite, for his last two years.

His career started with poetry which was published in various publications including Grain and Poetry Canada. Then he fell in love with movies and decided to write screenplays and, in 1980, moved to New York, where he lived for the next 22 years. He says, "living in New York gave me enough distance from northern Ontario to see it through a very long lens. I now visit North Bay and it seems exotic. It is exotic. It's ridiculous that anybody should live there, really, in the land of ice and snow. I mean, what kind of person comes to a hunk of rock surrounded by ice and pine trees and figures it's a good bet to settle down there? Okay, fur traders. But as soon as they have enough money fur traders head for Florida just like everyone else."

He worked in various restaurants and bars in New York before getting a two-year contract with Grosso-Jacobson, who co-produced Night Heat. In addition to working on Night Heat he wrote the pilot for Diamonds, a detective show that ran for a couple of years; and also wrote episodes for Law & Order and Street Legal.

His first novel, Cold Eye, was published in 1989 and was made into a French movie, Les Couleurs du diable (1997). He wrote the first in his John Cardinal series, Forty Words For Sorrow, in 2000. This was followed by The Delicate Story (2002); Blackfly Season (2005); and The Fields of Grief (2006), published in the USA as By the Time You Read This. The series, which has won both the British Crime Writers Silver Dagger and the Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis awards, is set in Algonquin Bay - a thinly disguised version of the city of North Bay, Ontario (about 200 miles from Toronto on the Ottawa River and Lake Lake Nipissing).

Blunt is currently taking a break from the John Cardinal series.  Two stand-alone novels are scheduled for publication in Canada in the coming months (no dates yet known for the USA): No Such Creature (Oct 2008) and Breaking Lorca (February 2009).

Filed under

This "beyond the book article" relates to By the Time You Read This. It originally ran in February 2007 and has been updated for the July 2008 paperback edition. Go to magazine.

This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access become a member today.
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket
    Prophet Song
    by Paul Lynch
    Paul Lynch's 2023 Booker Prize–winning Prophet Song is a speedboat of a novel that hurtles...
  • Book Jacket: The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern
    The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern
    by Lynda Cohen Loigman
    Lynda Cohen Loigman's delightful novel The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern opens in 1987. The titular ...
  • Book Jacket: Small Rain
    Small Rain
    by Garth Greenwell
    At the beginning of Garth Greenwell's novel Small Rain, the protagonist, an unnamed poet in his ...
  • Book Jacket: Daughters of Shandong
    Daughters of Shandong
    by Eve J. Chung
    Daughters of Shandong is the debut novel of Eve J. Chung, a human rights lawyer living in New York. ...

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
The Rose Arbor
by Rhys Bowen
An investigation into a girl's disappearance uncovers a mystery dating back to World War II in a haunting novel of suspense.
Book Jacket
The Berry Pickers
by Amanda Peters
A four-year-old Mi'kmaq girl disappears, leaving a mystery unsolved for fifty years.
Who Said...

If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas...

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Big Holiday Wordplay 2024

Enter Now

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.