The Fearsome Particles

by Trevor Cole

Trevor Cole’s bestselling debut novel garnered rave reviews and comparisons to Truman Capote and Kingsley Amis. Now the Governor General’s Award finalist is back with The Fearsome Particles, a brilliantly observed comic tragedy about the widening cracks in a family’s picture-perfect veneer.

Gerald Woodlore, a window screen executive, wakes one morning to find, to his utter dismay, that he has reached the limits of what he can control. The company he works for is rapidly losing market share and a junior assistant seems to be the only one with an idea how to fix it. His wife, Vicki, a luxury real-estate dresser, appears to be bending under the pressures of constructing an image of perfect happiness both at work and at home. But most worrying of all is Gerald and Vicki’s twenty-year-old son, Kyle, who quit school to volunteer with the military’s civilian support staff in Afghanistan. Now he has returned early and retreated to his room in the wake of a mysterious and traumatic event.

With his trademark wit and strong emotional insight, Trevor Cole has created a compelling, tender story that captures a family at a crucial turning point.

(From Publisher)

Trevor Cole’s first novel, Norman Bray In the Performance of His Life, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, a regional finalist for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and was longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The novel was serialized on CBC Radio and optioned for film. Trevor Cole is also a multiple-award-winning magazine journalist. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario.