"The Palace Thief"
We looked around for some information about what "The Palace Thief" is about.
We found out that the book won the 1994 Commonwealth Club Gold Medal for
Literature. This is a review we found on the book.
"A teacher at an exclusive prep school for boys doesn't reveal a student's
cheating, and has cause to regret that failure again decades later. In this
excerpt, the teacher has encountered another of his students, who is now an
adult.
He confirms that the former student had been unjustly passed over for an honor
he earned when he was a boy: "Oh, how little we understand of men if we think
that their childhood slights are forgotten! He smiled. He did not press the
subject further, and while I myself debated the merits of explaining why I had
passed him over for Sedgewick Bell forty-one years before, he pivoted the boat
around and brought it back to shore. The confirmation of his suspicions was
enough to satisfy him, it seemed, so I said nothing more. He had been an air
force major in our country's endeavors on the Korean peninsula, yet as he pulled
the boat onto the beach, I had the clear feeling of having saved him from some
torment."
We also found this about the writer, Ethan Canin.
"Canin's gift reveals itself as he creates characters unlike any we've ever met,
although they inhabit a world like ours and may resemble people we're fortunate
to know. He writes with such assurance that even when a character uses such
unusual words as "strumpet" and "pedimental," it sounds natural. There is drama
in his stories, but events don't so much drive the plots as they do reveal
aspects of the characters about whom Canin makes his readers care.
When contradictions appear in a character's personality, they surprise both the
character and us, allowing each to understand more fully.