Ray Robertson Books In Order

Novels

Home Movies (1997)
Heroes (2000)
Moody Food (2002)
Gently Down the Stream (2005)
What Happened Later (2007)
David (2009)
I Was There the Night He Died (2014)
1979 (2018)
Estates Large and Small (2022)

Non fiction

Novels Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Ray Robertson Books Overview

Heroes

Heroes tells the story of Peter Bayle heavy drinker, philosopher, scholar, and anemic lover as he visits a town in Kansas to write a story for Toronto Living magazine about the newfound love of middle America for the quintessential Canadian game of hockey. During his research Bayle encounters a host of odd characters: a morphine injecting reverend, a shunned reporter and his former crack addict girlfriend, and a drug salesman with his sights set on a career as a cable mogul. The article never gets written, and as Bayle becomes more and more involved in the destructive behaviour of the friends and enemies he has made, his problems back home continue to build. His assignment long since abandoned, Bayle returns to Toronto to face a future he does not want. It is a future obscured by a past he can’t let go of, but which he also can’t come to terms with.

Moody Food

Inspired by the exploits of ill fated country rock visionary Gram Parsons, this mid 60s tale of idealism and escape traces the trials of a fictionalized draft dodging flower child from the United States to Canada and back. It is the late 1960s in Yorkville, Toronto’s hippie ghetto of artists, intellectuals, drunken poets, and would be rock stars. In this idyllic haven, narrator Bill Hansen, a drummer, meets Thomas Graham, an American musician on the lam from the draft. The two form a band, but even as they revel in music and freedom, Graham is hobbled by another love: a drug habit that becomes his reason for living and, eventually, for dying. Graham’s emotional trip and failed, revolutionary life reflect the rise and fall of an entire generation’s aspirations.

What Happened Later

Poetic, poignant and clever, ‘What Happened Later‘ is a unique and engaging story of two lives that were forever changed by one book. In 1967, only ten years after the sensational success of ON THE ROAD, Jack Kerouac was a physically broken, spiritually lost man. Late that summer, accompanied by his friend, Joe Chaput, Kerouac set out for Riviere du Loup, Quebec, on a spiritual quest to connect with his French Canadian roots. Predictably, the trip was a drunken, chaotic disaster, and a little more than two years afterward, Kerouac was dead. Fifteen years later, after falling under the spell of the larger than life myth of Jack Kerouac, a working class, small town Ontario teenager named Ray Robertson embarked upon his own quest to own a copy of ON THE ROAD. Rebuffed at every turn in his attempt to possess the elusive novel, Robertson nonetheless slowly begins to recognize the existence of a world beyond the factories, hockey rinks and suburbs of his hometown, and also begins to comprehend his own French Canadian heritage. Taking its title from Kerouac himself ‘What Happened Later‘ was the title of his proposed sequel to ON THE ROAD this novel tells the story of what happened after the fame generated by Kerouac’s famous book and what happened next in the life of a young man infatuated with the legendary author. Interweaving the story of one author’s slow decline with one boy’s literary coming of age, ‘What Happened Later‘ explores the ever shifting dualities of myth and reality, loss and hope, innocence and experience, endings and beginnings.