After twenty years. Middle of the night, guitar on the roof, skates in the back, maybe two months' grace in the wallet....
At passing speed, squinting into the next few months, be hit the city limits....
Here he was, Bonaduce back in town.
He is Bobby "Loose" Bonaduce: professional hockey player, old-fashioned charmer, incorrigible rogue. After an athletic career spent chasing -- and never quite catching -- stardom, Bobby is facing the end of a long love affair with his own arrested adolescence. With the chasm of retirement before him, he is compelled to reach out to the family he abandoned years before, fast-talking his way into the home of Leah, the wife he left behind, and into a graduate seminar at the school where his son, Jason, is an undergrad. With valiant, bullheaded grace, Bobby wrestles with the earnest idiocies of academia, tilting desperately at writing assignments that stubbornly elude him. Yet at the same time -- unbeknownst to his family -- he is also struggling with an insidious disease that threatens to rob him of the one thing that has never let him down: his body.
Bobby's attempts to navigate the no-man's-land of his failed marriage, to fashion a kind of rough bond with his son, and to learn to trust the truths of his heart in place of the waning force in his body -- The Good Body blends all these strains into a funny, never sentimental, but deeply moving song, full of discordant harmonies and unexpected resolutions. Rich with poignancy and humor in equal measure, it marks a welcome American debut for a writer of singular insight into the human spirit.

The Good Body: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Gaston, Bill

Genre Fiction

William Morrow

Bobby "Loose" Bonaduce is a just-retired professional hockey player who lies his way into graduate school to lay emotional claim to his son, a student he abandoned two decades before. He is also -- unbeknownst to almost anyone -- struggling with an insidious disease that promises to rob him of the one thing that never let him down: his body. 
Bobby's attempts to navigate the no-man's-land of his failed marriage, to fashion a bond with his son, and to draw upon the truths in his heart in place of the waning force of his body -- Gaston weaves all these threads into a surprisingly funny, never sentimental, but deeply moving story, full of discordant harmonies and unexpected resolutions.

Harper Paperbacks

A recently divorced, early retiree accidentally burns down his house on the day he pays off the mortgage, only to discover that an uncharacteristic oversight has pitted him against an impassive corporate bureaucracy. An old friend of his, a middleaged musician, enters into a final negotiation with the pain of esophageal cancer. Her father, who left his family years ago to practise Buddhism in Nepal, ends his days in a facility for Alzheimer’s patients. These three are tied together by a book called The World, written by the old man in his youth. 
Possibly autobiographical, the book tells the story of a historian who unearths a cache of letters, written in Chinese, in an abandoned leper colony off the coast of Victoria. He and the young Chinese translator fall in love, only to betray each other in the cruelest way possible, each violating what the other reveres most. Magnificently written, structurally daring, and a masterful blend of imagination and observation, The World is arguably the greatest achievement so far of Bill Gaston’s career.

The World

Literary

Penguin Canada

SOINTULA

Sointula

Gaston’s characteristic keen insight and wit dazzle in this new collection. Readers will see the world through the prism of unfamiliar perspectives: a bank executive whose excellent sex life might in fact be killing her, an amorous tree surgeon better attuned to the values of his “patients” than to other people, a vacationing schizophrenic, a pizza-delivery boy convinced he’s witnessed magic—all struggling with the world as they see it. This versatile collection—at times darkly playful, absurd, or shockingly real—illustrates how we can fail to understand the simplest of truths and how we are trapped by the peculiarities of our own points of view. The Globe and Mail says that “Bill Gaston deserves to dwell in the company of Findlay, Atwood, and Munro as one of this country’s literary treasures.” In his hands, the outlandish becomes comprehensible and everyday life comes to look strange. What unifies these stories and their characters is the underlying faith in the humanity of even the most dangerously misguided among us. Brazenly entertaining, but just as often heartbreaking, Juliet Was a Surprise portrays the humour and unfairness of life through the blunders and crimes of quixotic men and women with whom we can’t help but sympathize.

Juliet Was a Surprise

Humor & Satire

Hamish Hamilton

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.

Midnight Hockey: All About Beer, the Boys, and the Real Canadian Game

Sports & Outdoors

Hockey

Doubleday, Canada

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. From the Hardcover edition.

Anchor Canada

Weaving together five heartbreaking stories, Bill Gaston transforms the cruelty of life into something not only beautiful but heartwarming. 
A recently divorced, early retiree accidentally burns down his house on the day he pays off the mortgage, only to discover that for the first time in his life he’s forgotten to pay a bill: his insurance premium. An old friend of his, a middle-aged musician, prepares for her suicide to end the pain of esophageal cancer. Her father, who left his family to study Buddhism in Nepal, ends his days in a Toronto facility for Alzheimer’s patients. The three are tied together not only by their bonds of affection, but by a book called The World, written by the old man in his youth. The book, possibly biographical, tells the story of a historian who unearths a cache of letters, written in Chinese, in an abandoned leper colony off the coast of Victoria. He and the young Chinese translator fall in love, only to betray each other in the cruellest way possible, each violating what the other reveres most.

Shortlisted for the 2019 RBC Taylor Prize Shortlisted for the 2019 BC Book Prize - Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize Shortlisted for the 2019 BC Book Prize - Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize From Giller-nominated, award-winning Bill Gaston, a tender, wry, and unforgettable memoir about alcohol, fishing, and all the things fathers and sons won't say to each other Sons clash with fathers, sons find reasons to rebel. And, fairly or unfairly, sons judge fathers when they take to drinking. But Bill Gaston and his father could always fish together. When they were shoulder-to-shoulder, joined in rapt fascination with the world under their hull, they had what all fathers and sons wish for. Even if it was temporary, even if much of it would be forgotten along with the empties. Returning to the past in his old fishing boat, revisiting the remote marina where they lived on board and learned to mooch for salmon, Bill unravels his father's relationship with his father, it too a story marked by heavy drinking, though one that took a much darker turn. Learning family secrets his father took to the grave, Gaston comes to understand his own story anew, realizing that the man his younger self had been so eager to judge was in fact someone both nobler and more vulnerable than he had guessed. Warm, insightful, and often funny, Just Let Me Look at You captures every father's inexpressible tenderness, and the ways in which the words for love often come too late for all of us.

Just Let Me Look at You: On Fatherhood

Parenting & Relationships

Tall Lives

Seal Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gaston, Bill. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Gaston, Bill

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gaston, Bill. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Good Body: A Novel

The Good Body: A Novel

The World

Sointula

Juliet Was a Surprise

Midnight Hockey: All About Beer, the Boys, and the Real Canadian Game

Midnight Hockey: All About Beer, the Boys, and the Real Canadian Game

The World

Just Let Me Look at You: On Fatherhood

Tall Lives