Penguin to publish Charlie Porter’s debut novel, NOVA SCOTIA HOUSE
News is out that the Particular Books imprint of Penguin Press will be publishing Charlie Porter’s novel Nova Scotia House on 20th March 2025.
Watching this novel grow over the past year has been one of those experiences an agent dreams of - being privileged to witness, and encourage, an exceptional creative act. At the time he was putting the finishing touches to this novel, Charlie Porter was publishing Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion, his non-fiction book about the constraints of clothes, and what can happen to the mind when you throw off those constraints. In Nova Scotia House he throws off the formal constraints of the sentence as we have come to accept it, and remakes a language that allows us into the thoughts of his protagonist, Johnny, a queer man who is in search of ways to live that were all but wiped out by the AIDS crisis. Hilton Als writes of “Sentences that reordered my reading DNA from the first, colloquial sentences that are highly literary, a kind of queering of Beckett, a new way of seeing and writing that is not anyone else's but Porter’s own.” I can only agree. And Particular Books/Penguin Press - an imprint and division of Penguin Random House UK that usually only publishes fiction when it is a ‘Penguin Classic’ - were so impressed that they have moved into publishing contemporary literary fiction in order to publish this. I’ve shared their blurb below. Bound proofs for early readers available soon. You can keep up to speed with Charlie’s events on his Instgram: @thecharlieporter. Roll on March.
Nova Scotia House is told entirely through the mind and memories of protagonist Johnny Grant, and travels between contemporary times and the early 1990s, in unnamed versions of London and New York. Johnny faces stark life decisions. Seeking answers, he looks back to his relationship with Jerry Field. When they met, nearly thirty years ago, Johnny was 19, Jerry was 45. They fell in love and made a life on their own terms in Jerry’s flat: 1, Nova Scotia House. Johnny is still there today — but Jerry is gone, and so is the world they knew.
As Johnny’s mind travels between then and now, he begins to remember stories of Jerry’s youth: of experiments in living; of radical philosophies; of the many possibilities of queer love, sex and friendship before the AIDS crisis devastated the queer community. Slowly, he realizes what he must do next — and attempts to restore ways of being that could be lost forever.
Nova Scotia House takes us to the heart of a relationship, a community, and an era. It is both a love story and a lament; bearing witness to the enduring pain of the AIDS pandemic and honouring the joys and creativity of queer life. Intimate, visionary, and profoundly original, it marks the debut of a vibrant new voice in contemporary fiction, and a writer with a liberating new story to tell.
Early praise for Nova Scotia House:
‘I truly think Charlie Porter is doing something new: forging a radically direct language for describing a whole new way of inhabiting the world. Nova Scotia House is about loss and grief, sex and love, but it’s also a super-powerful account of change and growth, about metabolising trauma and refusing to relinquish dreams’
Olivia Laing
‘Nova Scotia House is one of the best things I've read in many many years; it is an extraordinary work of the imagination, and there is so much heart and longing in it that it filled my soul. It is a completely imagined work — a kind of gay dystopian story that isn't, a search for family that ends up being a multiple love story about creation. And I want to point out something as powerful as the narrative: the sheer writing force of it. Sentences that reordered my reading DNA from the first, colloquial sentences that are highly literary, a kind of queering of Beckett, a new way of seeing and writing that is not anyone else's but Porter’s own. I am really knocked out by this book. It is a profound work’
Hilton Als
‘This book occupies the spaces, the lives in between, the connections we make, the memories still happening in our heads, our bodies' responsibility to the state we put them in, growing, lusting, dying, reviving, sold on, the ruins of our lives, the communities of our past, another kind of economy, of sex and loss and weeds and words, this work of genius, Nova Scotia House’
Philip Hoare