All the World's a Wonder

A playwright possessed by her muses, an actress desperate to succeed, and a doctor haunted by a lost love. Three people cross time and space to meet through the playwright's bizarre creative process: to create, the playwright must become her characters; to tell her tragic story, the actress must speak from the grave; to heal his harrowing past, the doctor must surrender to his patient - the playwright.

"Melia McClure weaves magical characterization and vulnerable emotion in a story that resounds like a thunderclap."
-- Kenneth Mark Hoover, author of the weird west novels Haxan and Quaternity

"What if the creative process, the way characters live in the imagination, wasn't imagination but magic--a haunting? What would the life of the artist be like? In All the World's a Wonder, we are introduced to a playwright whose fever-dream existence grapples with this very question. Both tormented and wickedly funny, she walks the tightrope of twisting ribbon that is time and space, destruction and redemption. Author Melia McClure is a razor-sharp explorer of the surreal, incomprehensible constructs of inner and outer realities, journeying through the perilous worlds of memory, guilt, loneliness, desire, and hope with an unflinching eye. Shifting seamlessly between playscript and prose and leaping from the violence of lost love to the salvation of storytelling, this novel reveals the staggering possibilities of the artist's mind and the human heart."
-- Cathie Borrie, author of the long hello: Memory, My Mother, and Me

"Compulsive, kinetic, and visceral. McClure brings to hectic life the factions of an artist's heart, littering the way with secrets, half truths, and a movable feast of unreliable narrators, leaving us all to wonder: what do our muses get up to on the other side of the mirror?"
-- S.M. Beiko, award-winning author of The Stars of Mount Quixx

Melia McClure

Melia McClure is the author of the novel The Delphi Room and continues to delve into the eccentric as a writer, editor, and actor. As an actor, she has traversed a range of realms, from a turn as Juliet in an abridged collage of Shakespeare's classic to the sci-fi universe of Stargate Atlantis. Melia studied writing at The Writer's Studio at Simon Fraser University, and her fiction was shortlisted for a CBC Literary Award. Born in Vancouver, she has since travelled the world in search of the ever-shapeshifting muse.