When a stranger crashes Hart Granger's 50th birthday party on the Plateau Montreal, Hart and his sister are taken back to childhood - to lies Hart told Amanda when they were kids.
"We had an older brother named Bill," he whispered to the impressionable five-year-old. "He had to leave the family to make room for you..." Embellished at every turn, the story haunted her childhood.
Suddenly, the lie incarnate is standing in front of them - Neil Springer, their half brother, a baby their mother put up for adoption when she became pregnant at 17. Neil is tall, dark, handsome, 55 but he looks much younger, and he once played forward for the NHL. Hart is plumpish, divorced, bored by life, a child prodigy with many unrealized ambitions.
While Amanda is thrilled to have a new big brother, the towering presence of an affable, small-town American sends Hart into a tailspin. He flees to California.
Handed a chance to fake his own death on September 11, 2001, he leaps, and lands in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. The decision lands him in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, where he is drawn into the tragic fate of an ailing Cree artist, and confronted with the deepest meaning of brotherhood.
Set in Montreal, Los Angeles and Vancouver amid a backdrop of international terrorism, Matters of Hart is a Rip Van Winkle story about a guy whose destiny is shaped by desperation and imagination.
Stylistically innovative, the novel tracks Hart's journey from multiple perspectives. First, through the eyes of five women in his life: Amanda recalls how the saga of the banished brother shaped her destiny. A German girl is inspired by meeting Hart on the night of his 'death'. His ex-wife, Sandrine, is liberated by his apparent demise and strikes up with a younger man. Hart's mother relives the secret that haunted his adolescence. And Wanda, a born-again Christian, enters a spiral of jealousy as her husband Neil grows besotted by his newfound family.
Then close-up on Hart: a scribbled confessional account of his seven month stay in Vancouver, which he writes while traveling across Canada by train. Finally, Hart's dramatic return to Montreal.
Back from the dead, he's a changed man.
Matters of Hart is available at bookstores, and via amazon.com or indigo.com.