Nova Scotia House

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 AlsBeautifully provocative, Nova Scotia House is the most compelling exploration of life, death, love and resistance that I’ve read for a very long time – Eimear McBrideThis is going to blow reader’s minds. Intense, physical, true – Paul FlynnI was wounded by Nova Scotia House. It’s undeniably fresh, but also a pressing reminder of the importance of community, hopeful yet richly painful – Nicola DinanThis 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 HoareNova Scotia House is surely the tenderest of AIDS books. It makes the always radical argument that play is more important than work. At heart, it’s a queer manifesto, proclaiming the value of queer experience and soul – Robert GluckIt’s a book made out of conversation, internal and external, it’s a variety of oral literature, I think, dropping punctuation as if you are slowly rushing to a train, incantatory, and Charlie Porter delivers a collected sensation that you are in it. We remember where we stood and forgetting is also enough. What a softly inspiring book about lived history and time and like I said, or he said, always love – Eileen MylesI 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 LaingNova Scotia House is just extraordinary. To read it is life-changing – Chantal JoffeI didn’t want to let this book go. The way it reveals its narrator, and its secrets – the pockets of emotion and memory that we half-hide from ourselves – is astonishing. The rhythm of the sentences is a spell. The pain is palpable, but worn with a kind of light melancholy, alternately bemused and amazed by the way things have turned out. Johnny and Jerry, their relationship, the long trail of damage inflicted by AIDS, the fight against numbness, and the way this book folds time again and again are with me – Nate Lippens

Charlie Porter is a writer, critic and curator. He is the author of the acclaimed books What Artists Wear and Bring No Clothes- Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion. He lives in London.