Robertson Davis is a major Canadian writer, a master of plot intricacies and riddles, one of the best storytellers in English literature. His “Deptford Trilogy” (“The Fifth Character,” “Manticore,” “World of Wonders”) was considered the beginning of the “Canadian breakthrough” in world literature. He was shortlisted for the Booker (with the novel What's in the Bones, included in this volume), was awarded the main Canadian literary award - the Governor General's Award, at the end of his life he almost received the Nobel Prize, but even though he remained forever among the candidates, has won the status of a world classic. So, we present to your attention under one cover the entire “Cornish Trilogy” that followed the “Deptford Trilogy”. While the Cornish Foundation is dealing with the legacy of the wealthy philanthropist and collector Francis Cornish, his secret biography is outlined by the daimon Maymas (“daimons are the personification of the artist’s conscience, they feed him with energy... go hand in hand... with fate”) and the angel of biographies Tzadkiel the Less (“it is he intervened when Abraham was about to sacrifice Isaac; so he is also an angel of mercy"); and this biography included intelligence service, forgery of paintings by old masters for the noblest reasons, and family secrets in all their diversity. The apotheosis of the Cornish Foundation’s activities is an unprecedentedly ambitious project: to complete E. T. A. Hoffmann’s unfinished opera “Arthur the British, or the Magnanimous Cuckold.” The great power of art - or the archetypes inherent in the plot itself - is such that the lives of everyone involved in the project begin to imitate the events of the opera. And from purgatory, Hoffmann himself observes all this, who once wrote: “Orpheus’s lyre opens the doors of the underworld”...