The Gum Thief Boxed Set - Tapa dura

The collector's two volume boxed set of Douglas Coupland's timeless office-store novel, The Gum Thief, complete with a special edition of the novel-within-the novel, Glove Pond.

In Douglas Coupland's ingenious new novel—think Clerks meets Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf—we meet Roger, a divorced, middle-aged "aisles associate" at Staples, condemned to restocking reams of 20-lb. bond paper for the rest of his life; and Roger's co-worker Bethany, in her early twenties and at the end of her Goth phase, who is looking at fifty more years of sorting the red pens from the blue in aisle 6.

One day, Bethany discovers Roger's notebook in the staff room. When she opens it up, she discovers that the old guy is writing mock diary entries pretending to be her: and, spookily, he is getting her right.

These two retail workers then strike up an extraordinary epistolary relationship. Watch their lives unfold alongside Roger's work in progress, the oddly titled Glove Pond, a tale of four academics, two malfunctioning marriages, and one rotten dinner party.

Roger's magnum opus is available to the public for the first time in this boxed set. Together and separately, The Gum Thief and Glove Pond confirm the visionary talent of Douglas Coupland, master chronicler of the absurdities of our times. Read them and remember that love, death and eternal friendship can all transpire where we least expect them ...and that even after tragedy seems to have wiped your human slate clean, stories can rebuild you.

Douglas Coupland is a novelist who also works in visual arts and theater. His novels include Generation X, All Families Are Psychotic, Hey Nostradamus!, Eleanor Rigby, and JPod. He lives and works in Vancouver, Canada.