Already highly-acclaimed as a poet and short-story writer, The Shadow Boxer announces Steven Heighton's arrival as a major new novelist on the Canadian literary scene. Intricately patterned and multi-layered, this is the story of Sevigne Torrins, poet and boxer, who sets off into the world to make it, and whose romantic and professional misadventures take him as far as Egypt before he finds his way back to the Great Lakes. But the classic writerly dream that Sevigne pursues turns out in practice to have a different and darker reality than any he had foreseen. Haunting and splendidly evocative, this is a passionate love story about the power of dreams and regret.