Winner of the UBC Medal for Biography and shortlisted for the Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize. The prolific novelist and social prophet H.G. Wells had a way with words, and usually he had his way with women. That is, until he encountered the feisty Toronto spinster Florence Deeks. In 1925 Miss Deeks launched a $500,000 lawsuit against Wells, claiming that in an act of "literary piracy," Wells had somehow come to use her manuscript history of the world in the writing of his international… source
❝ Scene
Aspen Brook lumber camp (near Grand Falls)
“They'd been the winter in the woods. She and Joe with Betty, their first baby. In the lumber camp at Aspen Brook… And they were coming back to Grand Falls before the breakup… They'd come to a dead tree on the side of the ridge. It stuck out of the snow like a skeleton, and the dog sensed the danger. But it was a place Joe remembered. Here, he said. We'll go down here and cut across the river.”
Macfarlane grounds the title image in the central-Newfoundland Goodyear family story (Grand Falls / Aspen Brook), the homefront-NL anchor, not the European battlefield.
David Macfarlane, The Danger Tree (1991), excerpt via Barnes & Noble book page — source
