Howard Norman

A memoir of the haunting and redemptive events of the acclaimed writer's life - the betrayal of a con-man father; a murder-suicide in his family's house; the presence of an oyster catcher - each one, as the saying goes, stranger than fiction. As with many of us, the life of novelist Howard...

"After my wife, Elizabeth Church, was murdered by the bellman Alfonse Padgett in the Essex Hotel, she did not leave me." Sam Lattimore meets Elizabeth Church in 1970s Halifax, in an art gallery. The sparks are immediate, leading quickly to a marriage that is dear, erotically charged, and brief...

Howard Norman, widely regarded as one of this country’s finest novelists, returns to the mesmerizing fictional terrain of his major books—The Bird Artist, The Museum Guard, and The Haunting of L—in this erotically charged and morally complex story. Seventeen-year-old Wyatt Hillyer is...

National Book Award Finalist Howard Norman delivers another provocative, haunting novel, this time set in a Vermont village and featuring a missing child, a newly married private detective, and a highly relatable ghost. Simon Inescort is no longer bodily present in his marriage. It's been...

Jacob Rigolet - a soon-to-be former assistant to a wealthy art collector - looks up from his seat at an auction to see his mother, the former head librarian at the Halifax Free Library, walking almost casually up the aisle. Before a stunned audience, she flings an open jar of black ink at master...

A drama of murder, love, and redemption set in Nova Scotia in the final year of World War I. It's 1918. The war in Europe grinds on, and the Spanish flu seems to be on an insatiable killing spree. But in the small fishing village of Parrsboro, Nova Scotia, a more confined drama-harrowing and...

Howard Norman’s The Bird Artist, the first book of his Canadian trilogy, begins in 1911. Its narrator, Fabian Vas, is a bird artist: he draws and paints the birds of Witless Bay, his remote Newfoundland coastal village home. In the first paragraph of his tale, Fabian reveals that he has...