Description

The Last Canterbury Tales by Jean Ray

Paperback – Wakefield Press – May 2026 – 168 pages

After 600 years, Geoffrey Chaucer and his fourteenth-century pilgrims overcome space and time to return to the Tabard Inn in Southwark, freshly cleansed of their sins, to resume the literary work left unfinished so long before. This time it is a new cast of storytellers picking up where the others had left off—a motley crew that includes a Prioress with a taste for executions, a sailor scarred by a filthy pinkness, a Mr. Mayeux who is also Uriah Chickenhead, and a madman who once made the mistake of asking after the Uhu. Among them is also a new listener: Tobias Weep, secretary of the Upper Thames Book Club, who has stumbled onto their impossible gathering, pinned to his chair by the impossible weight of a talking cat on his lap, who is none other than E. T. A. Hoffmann’s tomcat Murr.

Drawing on the lineage of British Gothic fiction, German Romanticism, and—with such character names as Mistress Squeak, Dick Wallet, Teddy Ruddle, and old Mr. Pankeydrop—Dickensian humor, Ray spins a series of tales that embody his own distinct mixture of weird Catholic mythology and cosmic horror. The Last Canterbury Tales, first published in French in 1944, makes no pretense of finishing Chaucer’s masterpiece but instead works toward a denouement of its own that reveals an unexpected act of storytelling underpinning this collection.