Robertson Davis is a major Canadian writer, a master of plot intricacies and riddles, one of the best storytellers in English-language literature. He was shortlisted for the Booker, and at the end of his life he almost received the Nobel Prize, but, even remaining forever among the candidates, he won the status of a world classic. His “Deptford Trilogy” (“The Fifth Character”, “Manticore”, “World of Wonders”), which became the beginning of the “Canadian breakthrough” in world literature, is already well known to the Russian reader, and now it is the turn of the “Cornish Trilogy”. It opened with "Rebel Angels", continued with the novel "What's in the Bones" (which reached the Booker short list), and ends with "The Lyre of Orpheus". Under the leadership of Arthur Cornish and his beautiful wife Mary Magdalene of Feotoki, the Cornish Foundation decides on 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 Maria, Arthur and everyone involved in the project begin to imitate the events of the opera. And from purgatory, Hoffmann himself is observing all this, who once wrote: “Orpheus’s lyre opens the doors of the underworld,” and he is not watching with idle interest...