83 Willcocks Street
Toronto, Ontario
Canada M5S 1C9
(tel) 416.324.8845
(fax) 416.324.8870
The Players
It is 1665, and young Lilly Cole must learn to act, to be one of the King’s players – for her it’s a question of survival. At the same time, two French explorers arrive in Court to charm two ships from the English King. Set in the libertine era of Restoration England, The Players takes us on a voyage of discovery.
This is the Court of King Charles II, a monarch who loved theatre and women, and loathed moralists. He is impressed by Lilly’s genius on stage; he enjoys her many skills. He also fosters a self-destructive young playwright, Bartholomew, who is in love with liquor, and with Lilly Cole.
The historical characters – King Charles, Prince Rupert, Radisson, Des Groseilliers – come alive in this novel’s own fantastical terms: just as they were marvelous figures in their own time.
The novel begins in Oxford England, moves to London, and then sets sail for Hudson Bay. The characters on this journey must learn to apply their skills in survival through all the many transformations of their environment, from plague-riddled London, to a small ship crossing the Atlantic, enduring the extreme cold at Rupert’s River in James Bay, and to return, utterly changed, if they’ve managed to live.
The Players suggests that we are all performing our own lives. In this novel, the ability to perform – in Court, on stage, in private quarters and in the brutal cold of James Bay – might save your life.
Goose Lane Editions, Canada, September 2009
"Sweatman excels at giving a feel for time and place without slowing down the pulse of the story." -Winnipeg Free Press
Margaret Sweatman is a novelist, playwright, and lyricist. For her three previous novels she has won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction, the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, the Carol Shields Winnipeg Award and the McNally Robinson Award for Manitoba Book of the Year. At the beginning of her career she won the John Hirsch Award for the most promising Manitoba writer. She performs with the Broken Songs Band and has won a Genie for a song she co-wrote with her husband Glenn Buhr, for the film, Seven Times Lucky. She teaches literature and creative writing at The University of Winnipeg, and was the first to hold the Carol Shields writer-in-residence post there. She lives in Winnipeg.
