Nova Scotia House (2025)
Why this one?
This one just randomly stood out on Netgalley - nice cover and some glowing endorsements, including one from Eimear McBride.
Charlie Porter (1973- ; active 2021-) was born in Northamptonshire, England. He is a journalist by trade, and began his career as a researcher for the Daily Express, skipping formal training as he couldn't afford it (he'd wanted to study fashion journalism at Central St Martin's). He worked as an arts reporter for The Times and Esquire in the 1990s, before taking up his first fashion role at the Guardian in 2000. He has subsequently written on fashion for titles including GQ, i-D and the Financial Times. He has published two non-fiction books on fashion: 2021's What Artists Wear and 2023's Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion.
Nova Scotia House, Porter’s debut novel, will be published by Particular Books / Penguin Press in March 2025. Thanks to them and Netgalley for the ARC.
Thoughts, etc.
Nova Scotia House is told in the unique interior voice of Johnny Grant, who as a 19-year-old in the 1980s met and fell in love with Jerry Field, a 45-year-old who was HIV positive at a time when that meant a guaranteed and imminent death sentence. It’s narrated from some 30 years hence, as Johnny struggles to negotiate the modern world without Jerry (now long dead) and without much of the exuberance and idealism that characterised their time together.
The novel jumps around in time, between the gentrified tower blocks and soulless hookups of Johnny’s modern London and back to various points in his life with Jerry (and soon after his death) in the 80s and 90s. We learn about Jerry’s international playboy lifestyle, his experiments in communal living, and his eventual settling down alongside Johnny, with art, gardening and cooking providing a different pace of living as he encourages Johnny’s own youthful experimentation while he himself contemplates a tragic early demise.
While much of the novel is very much an intimate affair, chronicling both the joy and the sadness of the central pair’s doomed relationship, it also very much opens up outwards to shine a light on the wider tragedy of AIDS. Memorable sections include Johnny’s passionate on-stage protest at a medical company that rather than making its lifesaving drugs accessible seems instead focusing on sowing hatred; and a later post-Jerry section in which he visits the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt, with the (presumably real-life) visual examples that Porter unexpectedly deploys truly heartbreaking to see.
It’s a book that’s told in a unique voice, imitative of Johnny’s interior monologue in a way that involves a lot of repetition and little punctuation. While initially a little tough to orient oneself around as a reader, it quickly settled into place for me and represented a pacey, brutally honest mode of storytelling, reminding me a little of James Kelman or something along those lines. The more you understand Johnny and his life experience, the more the mixture of anxiety-ridden hesitancy punctuated by poetic bursts of passion that the language conveys begins to make sense.
It’s a book that creeps up on you somewhat. It begins in a whirl of energy, with vibrant descriptions of clubbing, hooking up and some graphic sex. But its emotional core takes a little longer to develop, as Johnny explores his past, both as a form of belated grief for his lost love and seemingly as a way of pulling together ideas and lessons that Jerry taught him, and using them to begin to shape a new, potentially more hope-filled life.
Along the way it doesn’t shy away from the depths of pain endured by Jerry and the loss felt by Johnny, and is certainly not an easy read as a result. But it’s also one that scatters through notes of celebration of life, highlights the simple and hard to explain small joys that keep people going through extremes of suffering, and ends on a note of relative optimism, in spite of everything.
Score
8
A really strong debut which tackles familiar and tragic themes in a fresh voice.
Next up
TBC.
