Portrait of Canada's National hockey team

Hometown Heroes : On the Road with Canada's National Hockey Team

Quarrington, Paul

HarperCollins Publishers Canada, Limited

Home Game

Penguin Canada

One morning in Don Mills, Phil and his brother Jay agree to let their friend Norman Kitchen tag along on an adventure down into a ravine — and what happens there at the hands of two pitilessteenagers changes all their lives forever. Years later the horrifying details are still unclear, smothered in layers of deliberate forgetting. Phil doesn’t even remember the names: Ted and Terry? Tom and Tony? It’s only when he descends into a crisis of his own that he comes to realize that perhaps, as he drunkenly tells a crisis line counsellor, “I went down into a ravine, and never really came back out.” The Ravineis Phil’s book — we read it as he types it, in the basement apartment he’s called home since his wife kicked him out for having an affair with a make-up girl. As he writes, and then corrects what he’s written, we hear how he went from promising young playwright to successful, self-hating TV producer. We listen in on his disastrous late-night phone calls, and watch his brother (once a brilliant classical pianist) weep to himself as he plays Ravel and Waltzing Matilda in a desolate bar. The Ravinetells us all about the influence of The Twilight Zone on Phil’s work and his life — how it helped him meet his wife Veronica and then lose her, and how it led to the bizarredeath of his friend, TV star Edward Milligan. Sometimes, when Phil’s drunk, a friend will look at what he’s written so far and call him on it — like when Jay tells Phil that he’s remembered it all wrong: that he was just as good as Phil at tying knots back when they were in the cubs. Phil’s “ravine”is his attempt to make sense of things, to try to understand how everything went so wrong just as it seemed to be going so right. But The Ravineis also a Paul Quarrington novel, meaning that it’s hilarious and ingenious, quietly working its magic until the reader is at once heartbroken and hopeful. A darkly funny story about loss and redemption, The Ravineis also about how stories are made — how they can pull us out of disasters that seem too much for anyone to bear — and about how, sometimes, what we need to forgive ourselves for is not what we think it is at all.

The Ravine

Literature & Fiction

World Literature

Random House Canada

Dramas & Plays

Vintage Canada

A baseball game is organized to decide whether or not a marooned circus sideshow troupe should be expelled from a small Michigan town controlled by a fundamentalist religious sect

United States

DOUBLEDAY

Percival Leary was once the King of the Ice, one of hockey's greatest heroes. In the South Grouse Nursing Home, where he shares a room with Edmund "Blue" Hermann, the antagonistic and alcoholic newspaper reporter who once chronicled his career, learly looks back on his tumultuous life and times: his days at the boys' reformatory when he burned down a house; the four mad monks who first taught him how to play hockey; and the time he executed the perfect "St. Louis Whirlygig" to score the winning goal in the 1919 Stanley Cup finals. Now all but forgotten, Leary is only a legend in his own mind until a high-powered advertising agency decides to feature him in a series of ginger ale commercials. With his male nurse, his son, and the irrepressible Blue, Leary sets off for Toronto on one last madcap adventure as he revisits scenes of his glorious life as the King of the Ice. From the Trade Paperback edition.

King Leary

Doubleday, Canada

Logan In Overtime

pp.213.SIGNED, DATED AND DEDICATED by the author on title page

WHALE MUSIC

Whale Music

Des Howell is a former rock 'n' roll star who never leaves his secluded oceanfront mansion. Naked, rich and fabulously deranged, he subsists on a steady diet of whiskey, pharmaceuticals and jelly doughnuts and occasionally works on his masterpiece, "Whale Music." One day, upon awakening from his usual drunken stupor, Des discovers on his sofa a young alien from the faraway universe of Toronto. This girl has made the trek to Des' hideaway because she believes in the "Whale Music" and she's crazy enough to think that Des can make a comeback hit with his mad magnum opus-- From the Trade Paperback edition.

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

Books by Quarrington, Paul

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

Hometown Heroes : On the Road with Canada's National Hockey Team

Home Game

The Ravine

The Ravine

Home Game

King Leary

Logan In Overtime

WHALE MUSIC

King Leary

Whale Music