House on Major Street

When free-spirited teenager Zan sets out on her bike to buy kitty litter she has no idea she's about to send her neighbour and maybe-sort-of crush Tallis into a months-long coma, kicking off a series of events both real and surreal that will change everything and everyone on her Toronto Annex street. Metafictional appearances are made by characters as diverse as J. J. O'Molloy, Chekhov's Ryabovitch, an infamous lapdog and the indignant Rebecca Whitehall, heroine of fictional Sheila Shott's steamy romance novels. As these and a multitude of others interact with the inhabitants of 2X8 Major Street, friendships, dalliances and alliances are formed and re-formed with uncommon results. Unexpected guests arrive ... and stay. Two questions overarch: Will Tallis ever wake up? And what will that mean for everyone?

223 Pages
8.75" x 5.5"
2018

Leon Rooke is an energetic and prolific storyteller whose writing is characterized by inventive language, experimental form and an extreme range of characters with distinctive voices. He has written a number of plays for radio and stage and produced numerous collections of short stories. It is his novels, however, that have received the most critical acclaim. Fat Woman (1980) was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award and won the Paperback Novel of the Year Award. Shakespeare's Dog won the Governor General's Award in 1983 and toured as a play as far afield as Barcelona and Edinburgh. A Good Baby was made into a feature film. Rooke founded the Eden Mills Writers' Festival in 1989. In 2007, Rooke was made a member of the Order of Canada. Other awards include the Canada/Australia prize, the W. O. Mitchell Award, the North Carolina Award for Literature and two ReLits (for short fiction and poetry). In 2012, he was the winner of the Gloria Vanderbilt Carter V. Cooper Fiction Award. He lives in Toronto.

The Porcupine’s Quill is an artisanal book publisher that values the art and craft of the book in form and content. They specialize in acquiring work by Canadian authors whose voices are new, underrepresented or verging on oblivion, with a particular focus on books that represent the intersection between literature and other creative disciplines: between text and image, memoir and music, letterpress and offset.