Forde Abroad

`The sequel to the short story ``Travelling Northward'', Forde Abroad by John Metcalf (Senior Editor of The Porcupine's Quill) is a superbly crafted short novel that again presents Robert Forde, a writer, aesthete, and henpecked husband (Robert's loving wife rather insistently prefers him to drink tea instead of coffee because it's ``better for his health''). Forde Abroad brings Robert from his Ottawa home to Ljubljana in order to attend a meeting of the Literary and Cultural Association of Slovenia. Quirky and engaging personalities range from a professional Serbian language translator, to a gay British expatriate from Sweden who is a Yugoslavian expert, to Forde's longstanding literary correspondent Karla. A literate and thoroughly entertaining story fill the pages of this engaging, brief, and highly recommended work of original fiction.'