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 opens with “Rebel Angels.” The legacy of the wealthy philanthropist and collector Francis Cornish attracts the most varied, if not irreconcilable, characters: Simon Darcourt, a kind-hearted priest and scientist; Clement Hollier - professor, expert in the dark aspects of medieval psychology; Parlabane - a defrocked monk and a brawler; Arthur Cornish, a young businessman who is appointed executor of the will; and also Mary Magdalene Feotoki, a beautiful graduate student who has a strange power over them. Had she bewitched them with her charms? No wonder they say that all gypsies are witches...