Search Results: Returned 6 Results, Displaying Titles 1 - 6
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2010., House of Anansi Press Call No: Fic Gas Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: Here is a paperback edition of Bill Gaston's breakthrough novel, a triumphant blend of mordant humour and heartbreak. It tells the comic and poignant story of a just-retired pro-hockey ruffian named Bobby Bonaduce who is stubbornly ignoring a disease--multiple sclerosis--that may be killing him. Bobby returns to his hometown and lies his way into graduate school in a misguided attempt to redeem his messy past and lay emotional claim to a son he abandoned 20 years ago. Gaston shows us once again that he is "one of this country's outstanding literary treasures" (Globe and Mail).
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2014., General, Hamish Hamilton Call No: Fic Gas Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: 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. 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.
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2018., Hamish Hamilton Canada Call No: Bio G256j Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "Bill Gaston's relationship with his father was stormy. Sons clash with fathers, particularly with towering, authoritarian figures like Gaston Senior. Fairly or unfairly, sons look for reasons to rebel, particularly against boring suburban fathers who seem to prize conformity above all else. And fairly or unfairly, sons judge their fathers when they can't handle their booze. But even a father and son as doomed to clash as Gaston and his father could fish together. When they were shoulder-to-shoulder, joined in shared anticipation and common purpose, gazing at the waves of the Pacific Ocean, they were no longer betrayed by their differences. When Gaston's father dies, this is the memory of his father that he keeps alive. In the years that follow, however, he learns more about his father's realtionship with his father. It too was marked by heavy drinking, though it took a much darker turn. What Gaston comes to realize is that the man his younger self had been so eager to judge was in fact capable of near-heroic feats of self-mastery. And as a father of grown sons himself, he acutely feels the wounds he must have inflicted years before by withholding so much he now knows that fathers long for. Returning to the past, Gaston goes back to those times in the boat, and comes to understand his own story anew as he sees his father in a new light. Warm, often funny, and alive to all the ways in which the words for love so often come too late, Just Let Me Look at You captures a father's inexpressible tenderness for a child and the longing he feels when that child becomes a man."--
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c2012., Adult, Penguin Canada Call No: Fic Gas Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: 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.
