This is the story of Sevigne Torrins, poet and boxer, who sets out to make it in the world but whose sexual and professional misadventures take him from a demanding, muscular boyhood on the shores of Lake Superior to the trendy, bohemian life of Toronto and even to Egypt. In the tradition of such classics as LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL and JUDE THE OBSCURE, THE SHADOW BOXER is that rarest of contemporary performances, an ambitious, unabashedly romantic story about an exposed soul determined to live life to the hilt. Only a writer of Steven Heighton's extraordinary gifts could pull it off with such unsentimental passion and literary grace.