Bill Gaston Books In Order

Novels

  1. Tall Lives (1989)
  2. The Cameraman (1994)
  3. Bella Combe Journal (1995)
  4. The Good Body (2000)
  5. Sointula (2004)
  6. The Order of Good Cheer (2008)
  7. The World (2012)

Collections

  1. Deep Cove Stories (1989)
  2. North of Jesus Beans (1993)
  3. Sex Is Red (1998)
  4. Mount Appetite (2002)
  5. Gargoyles (2006)
  6. Juliet Was a Surprise (2014)
  7. A Mariner’s Guide to Self Sabotage (2018)

Non fiction

  1. Midnight Hockey (2006)
  2. Just Let Me Look at You (2018)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Bill Gaston Books Overview

Sointula

Summoned to the deathbed of a long ago lover, Evelyn is overcome by emotion. Off her medications, she impulsively steals a kayak and embarks on a quest that takes her deep into the Canadian wilderness in order to find her lost son, Tom. On the way to Sointula, a remote fishing village off Vancouver Island, she gains a traveling companion, Peter Gore, a writer working on the quintessential book on the region. Stymied by illness, writer’s block, and whiskey, Peter makes an unlikely and unreliable shipmate and paramour. Tom, the survivor of a gunshot wound that slowed his speech and his drug dealing, finds solace in his isolated life, collecting data for a whale researcher. As Evelyn and Peter approach, Tom waits for the whales’ irregular visits to the water’s edge. Like the novels of David Malouf and Jonathan Raban, Sointula is a celebration of place, a novel where the landscape comes as fully alive as its memorable characters.

The Order of Good Cheer

A fascinating yet little known figure in North American history, the French explorer and mapmaker Samuel de Champlain was the subject of a recent best selling biography by historian David Hackett Fischer. The Order of Good Cheer, a highly readable novel by master storyteller Bill Gaston, offers a beautifully shaded, fictionalized portrait of Champlain, as well as a marvelous window into Canadian culture past and present. In 1607, Champlain and his companions struggled to establish a French colony on foreign soil while warding off scurvy. Separated by the breadth of a continent and exactly 400 years is 21st century blue collar worker Andy Winslow and his friends, whose urban landscape is threatened by encroaching environmental and economic disaster. In alternating narratives, Gaston bridges the divide across land and time in this illuminating story about survival, love, feast, and friendship.

Mount Appetite

Short listed for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize, Mount Appetite presents 12 vibrant, intensely human tales of desire and alienation. ‘Everyone at the top of Mt. Appetite is as close as they can get to heaven. It’s work to get there and agony to be denied.’ Whether a salmon researcher, professional taster, illiterate faith healer, or Malcolm Lowry’s illegitimate son, the protagonists in these sly and witty stories have all climbed the mountain, and all share a restless, relentless longing that they struggle to satiate through alcohol, drugs, sex, or schemes of the heart. Bill Gaston, author of the critically acclaimed The Good Body, evinces a remarkable dexterity of voice as he moves effortlessly among his colorful cast of characters, drawing the junkie with the same skill and compassion as the teenaged 7 11 clerk. Grotesque, unsettling, and oddly tender, Mount Appetite is short fiction at its finest.

Gargoyles

In this remarkable collection, Bill Gaston crafts his fiction around the idea of the gargoyle the concrete representation of extremes of human emotions. This marvelous, riotous, Rabelaisian world contains Gargoyles that are physical manifestations of the disfigurements and contortions to which human beings subject themselves. Each of the collection’s 12 stories has a strange and unique guardian spirit whose sometimes benevolent, sometimes malevolent presence informs the characters and their actions. A boy struggles with self image and the need to fit in. A grieving parent tries to prevent others from making his mistake; tragedy ensues. A vengeful son settles a score with mom and her new lover. Other stories focus on familial delight, as well as discord in the lives of an over the top artist, a drunken uncle, and a bitter writer. All show one of Canada’s finest writers at the top of his form.

Midnight Hockey

From Giller nominated author Bill Gaston, proof not only that hockey players can read, but that some of them can even write. Midnight Hockey tells the story of Gaston’s final season, as he contemplates hanging up his skates, and looks back on the sport that has meant so much to him. Sometimes lewd and hilarious, sometimes though not as often reflective, Midnight Hockey is a portrait of Canada s fastest growing athletic phenomenon: beer league and oldtimers hockey. Gaston spills the beans about the rules of the game written and unwritten, weird beer, team names, and road trip sex, illustrated with stories of Gaston s life in the game, from the outdoor rinks of Winnipeg, through junior hockey, varsity, the professional leagues of Europe, to the late night games and road trip shenanigans of beer league. For all those thousands of guys who drive to the rink late on a snowy night, who know the euphoria of a beer after the game, who think of how good they used to be, who grow nostalgic over a whiff from an unwashed hockey bag and for anyone who has had to live with such a person Midnight Hockey is laugh out loud funny, true to life, and ultimately thoughtful.

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