Sometimes those who have the most seem bent on throwing it away. Meet Bob Sterling, a comfortable middle-aged professor, a specialist in the life of Edgar Allan Poe, married to a former student with whom he has a young son. In the space of a week his family, marriage, career, sanity, and life are brought to the brink of ruin in the aftermath of a trip he makes with a student, the intense young poet Sienna Chu, who tweaks into florescence a long-harboured, secret sexual fetish. Then add to the mix the misadventures of his wife’s mentally failing mother, a shy night prowler, and Sienna’s explosive techno-junkie roommate. Poignant and gritty, tantalizingly erotic, Losing It is a high-wire act that plays out as a delicious blend of darkness and humour as it embraces the surprising emotional connections that are made in the midst of life’s madness.Author Biography: Alan Cumyn’s books are Man of Bone (1998), winner of the Ottawa-Carleton Book Award (as it was then known) and a finalist for the prestigious Trillium Book Award in 1999; Burridge Unbound (2000), which won the Ottawa Book Award and was a finalist for The Giller Prize; and Losing It (2001).Cumyn worked for eight years for the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board, writing on international human-rights issues. He has taught in the People’s Republic of China and in Indonesia, ran a group home in Toronto for Katimavik, and is the author of a bestselling guide to working and studying abroad. Alan Cumyn lives in Ottawa.