I am very pleased that Stonehewer Books has decided to update and reissue my 1997 book of linked short stories, now called Buying on Time Again in the fall of 2025. See the proposed cover below.
This collection was serialized on CBC radio, and short-listed for the Leacock Medal for Humour and City of Toronto Literary Award. We added Again to the original title and I have also added an essay and a prequel I wrote a few months after the book first came out.
In other news Cormorant Books has picked up my latest novel, The Seaside Café Metropolis, for publication in 2026, so I will be deep in working on notes for the next season or two. Here is a summary I provided to the publisher:
The Seaside Cafe Metropolis is a comic novel set in Khrushchev-era Vilnius – it’s like a cross between The Grand Budapest Hotel and A Gentleman in Moscow. It tells the story of a Toronto expatriate from the Royal York Hotel stuck in Vilnius with his determinedly communist mother circa 1958. He tries to make the best of it by running a fashionable bohemian restaurant while the KGB listens in from the basement.
Food is a major concern in the novel, and each chapter includes a Soviet-era recipe.
Some of the plot elements are taken from true history, such as the visit from Jean-Paul Sartre, and others come from the novel upon which the opera, La Bohème, was based. I stayed in the real cafe that inspired this novel in 1975, and its interior has been preserved, so I recently dined there on Chicken Kiev. Some historic photos can be found at this site.
