Claude Bissell first met Ernest Buckler in 1953. Holidaying with his family in Nova Scotia, Bissell dropped in on the novelist to say how much he admired Buckler's recently published The Mountain and the Valley. That first afternoon meeting was such a success that the Bissell's returned to the Buckler house a few hours later. The formal atmosphere of afternoon tea was replaced by a lively, gin-laced evening, and a thirty year friendship was begun. In the early years it was fuelled mostly by letters and the Bissell's occasional visits to Nova Scotia. (Buckler hated to leave his home in the country at Centrelea, near Bridgetown.) Butr in 1960 the Bissell's bought a summer place in Cape Breton, and thereafter they were able to spend more time with Buckler every year. Nova Scotia is more than a background to this story. Buckler had a clear-eyed sensitvity to the landscape and human character of his native Annapolis Valley. It lay at the heart of his writing, and writing lay at the heart of his life. Although Bissell focuses on Buckler the man, the book also includes passages of extended critical analysis of Buckler's work. It describes the long apprenticeship of the writer before his sudden emergence as a major figure in 1952 with the publication of The Mountain and the Valley. Bissell shows how a central theme binds together the major books--the memory of a childhood paradisal world that time could never corrupt. Much of the conversation and correspondence between the two men was about literature. Buckler was widely read in the modern novel and loved to talk about his favourites. He had a hypersensitivity to the troubles of those close to him. Above all he had an indestructible sense of humour, which fed upon his own eccentricities and the foibles of others. It was this sense of humour that enabled him to rise above continuous ill health and his and his despair at the course humanity was taking. A delight to friends and a restorative to himself, the humour was at its richest and best in his letters. Many letters are included in the book. Some are from other writers who had admired Buckler's fiction, such as Margaret Laurence and Alice Munro. Others deal with his work as a critic for Esquire and the New York Times, among others, and record in unusually vivid language the emotions and efforts of a careful, imaginative author. An intriguing man emerges from these documents and from Bissell's memories--warm and funny, and a bit of an eccentric. He had a sharp and ready wit, a passion for reading, and a love of good conversation. He also loved to laugh, but was subject to bouts of melancholy. These facets come together in this entertaining portrait of a man remembered by Canadians as a writer of uncommon insight and power, and by Claude Bissell as a friend.