FYI…this event is now sold out, but there is a waitlist and ticket resell has been activated!
The Gay's the Word is delighted to invite you to launch event for the HUGELY anticipated debut novel from Charlie Porter, author of Bring No Clothes
Nova Scotia House (published 20th March)
Johnny Grant faces stark life decisions. Seeking answers, he looks back to his relationship with Jerry Field. When they met, nearly thirty years ago, Johnny was 19, Jerry was 45. They fell in love and made a life on their own terms in Jerry’s flat: 1, Nova Scotia House. Johnny is still there today – but Jerry is gone, and so is the world they knew.
As Johnny’s mind travels between then and now, he begins to remember stories of Jerry’s youth: of experiments in living; of radical philosophies; of the many possibilities of love, sex and friendship before the AIDS crisis devastated the queer community. Slowly, he realizes what he must do next—and attempts to restore ways of being that could be lost forever.
Nova Scotia House takes us to the heart of a relationship, a community and an era. It is both a love story and a lament; bearing witness to the enduring pain of the AIDS pandemic and honouring the joys and creativity of queer life. Intimate, visionary, and profoundly original, it marks the debut of a vibrant new voice in contemporary fiction, and a writer with a liberating new story to tell.
We very much hope you will join us for this relaxed and friendly in conversation event on Tuesday 25th March at Gay's the Word bookshop, near Russell Square tube. Tickets are £3 with complimentary refreshments served on the night. Doors 7pm.
Praise
Nova Scotia House is one of the best things I've read in many many years; it is an extraordinary work of the imagination, and there is so much heart and longing in it that it filled my soul. It is a completely imagined work--a kind of gay dystopian story that isn't, a search for family that ends up being a multiple love story about creation. I am really knocked out by this book. It is a profound work - Hilton Als
Beautifully provocative, Nova Scotia House is the most compelling exploration of life, death, love and resistance that I've read for a very long time - Eimear McBride
This is going to blow reader’s minds. Intense, physical, true - Paul Flynn
I was wounded by Nova Scotia House. It’s undeniably fresh, but also a pressing reminder of the importance of community, hopefully yet richly painful. - Nicola Dinan
This book occupies the spaces, the lives in between, the connections we make, the memories still happening in our heads, our bodies' responsibility to the state we put them in, growing, lusting, dying, reviving, sold on, the ruins of our lives, the communities of our past, another kind of economy, of sex and loss and weeds and words, this work of genius, Nova Scotia House - Philip Hoare
Nova Scotia House is surely the tenderest of AIDS books. It makes the always radical argument that play is more important than work. At heart, it’s a queer manifesto, proclaiming the value of queer experience and soul - Robert Gluck
It’s a book made out of conversation, internal and external, it’s a variety of oral literature, I think, dropping punctuation as if you are slowly rushing to a train, incantatory, and Charlie Porter delivers a collected sensation that you are in it. We remember where we stood and forgetting is also enough. What a softly inspiring book about lived history and time and like I said, or he said, always love - Eileen Myles