Robert Hough’s excellent first two novels were both fictionalized accounts of real life events. His debut, The Final Confession of Mabel Stark, was based on the life of a legendary female tiger tamer of the same name and has been optioned for a feature film by actress Kate Winslet and her husband, director Sam Mendes. His follow-up, 2004’s The Stowaway, was one of the best Canadian novels of that year. It was a riveting account of the experiences of a Phillipine tanker crew that saved the life of a Romanian stowaway by hiding him from the ship’s merciless captain. Read more…