Two Knapsacks: A Novel of Canadian Summer Life

Two young Toronto bachelors, armed with nothing but knapsacks and an encyclopedic disdain for the city's summer heat, abandon their literary society meeting (adjourned, tragically, for lack of quorum) and set off on foot into the Ontario countryside. Eugene Coristine and Farquhar Wilkinson are perfectly matched in their romantic indifference and their passionate belief that the best company is each other's, fortified by conversation about books and the open road. What follows is a gently comic portrait of two friends discovering that the simple life, when you're actually living it, involves considerably more blisters, rain, and questionable hospitality than their literary imaginations had accounted for. Written in 1896, this is escapist entertainment in its purest form: a story about men who have read too much Ruskin and Thoreau deciding to test those ideas against actual mud and mosquitoes. It endures because the friendship at its heart feels exactly right, and because every reader who has ever wanted to leave everything behind for a walk through the woods will recognize something true in their doomed, glorious optimism.