Nova Scotia House: A Novel by Charlie Porter (Paperback)

Paperback Publishes 19 March 
 
He said he would understand if it was too much for me, that I could leave him, that I was young, I should be living, I said to him, I am living.

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.
 
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'Exhilarating, risk-taking, life-affirming … Porter offers the reader a utopian glimpse of pre-Aids queer culture being born again, and of anger and grief turning into possibility' - Neil Bartlett
 
'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
 
'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 Glück
 
'I was wounded by Nova Scotia House. It’s undeniably fresh, but also a pressing reminder of the importance of community, hopeful yet richly painful' - Nicola Dinan