Just Once, No More

One of The Globe and Mail’s Best Books of 2023

“A meditative rumination on issues of mortality, family, and what it means to be alive in the world… . [Just Once, No More is] a series of lyrical musings … that cumulatively comprise an emotional cartography of the author’s developing understanding of how to exist in a body among other bodies, both human and animal… . The payoff is being in the presence of a supple, inquisitive mind … through the vicissitudes of human existence.” —Toronto Star

“A beautiful elegy on the aches of an aging heart. Sad, yes, but in a luminous way, like a flickering, crackling vintage lightbulb. Truly, a book that is wise and moving.” —Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi

“Charles Foran, at his dying father’s bedside, traces the giant, altering moments and the end-of-day tender ones that shape them both. This is an eyes-open memoir about how we fly apart and come together; about the fierce and gentle hold of fatherhood; about the ways art can make meaning; about love, sadness, and the ties that bind. Elegiac, intimate and honest, this is a beautiful, tender book, so spare and lovely, so full of little diamonds of truth.” —Lisa Moore, author of February

Charles Foran is a Member of the Order of Canada and a senior fellow at Massey College in the University of Toronto. He is the author of eleven books of fiction and nonfiction, and has won many awards and honours, including the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Canadian Jewish Book Award, the Charles Taylor Prize, and the Writers’ Trust Fellowship. From 2020 to 2023, he served as the Executive Director of the Writers’ Trust of Canada. He lives in Toronto.

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