Young Spike Santee grapples with a gnawing sense he is destined for something big — what, exactly, remains to be seen!

Shaped by a near-death experience at the age of six, Spike Santee is a seeker — one of those people who longs for the unknown, for the exotic. Love — or perhaps lust — eventually draws him from his Oregon home in 1968 to Norway, and eventually on to Sweden, where he proceeds to fall in and out of relationships with a succession of strong, intelligent women.

In the tradition of The Good Soldier Švejk, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or Another Roadside Attraction, Spike delivers a dose of wry observations on the human condition, through the lens of a young American male coming of age in societies whose attitudes toward everything from sex to politics to cuisine were — and largely still are — as un-American as surströmming.

ABOUT RG MORSE

RG Morse is a Canadian-American author.

After several adventurous years in Scandinavia, Morse briefly became an academic. Soon restless, he left a boring, if promising, future as a political scientist to launch a career in publishing and writing. He went on to found several successful Canadian publishing companies, working with legions of authors, including Myrna Kostash, Irving Layton, Tom Wolfe, and Graham Greene.

He served as President of the Book Publishers Association of Alberta, and sat on the national council of the Association of Canadian Publishers for several years. The author of five books, recipient of the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting's Dalton Camp Award for his writing on media and democracy, Morse is also a gallery-represented artist, singer/songwriter, broadcaster, and mountaineer.

He and his wife, Janet, live in Kaslo, a tiny, remote village on the shores of fjord-like Kootenay Lake in the mountains of southeastern British Columbia, where he is currently working on several novels while attempting — without much success — to stay out of trouble.