TRASHLAND

In a nursery-tale world in eclipse trampled over by post-modernist detritus, two dirty rotten scoundrels scrabble to the top over each other's backs. The top is fame. There is nothing else.

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On a blazing afternoon outside Guelph, on a flagstone patio shaded by an awning propped up in the best traditions of Jamaican sugar plantations, George Brossing, a wall-eyed hunchback, is getting whacked. Keeping an eye on his trembling hand inching towards his vodka glass, his radical partner Barbra pens poetry inspired by the rogue clover on the old tractor path to the creek - 'bloody is their shade'. The reeds along the creek, sticking out of mattresses of laundromat foam, barely stir in the dirty, superheated air. Looking out on his lost world, George, former farmboy, drifts into delirium tremens. In that dire twilight settling over the upmarket farmhouse, Herbie Peel is born in the kitchen sink.

Herbie's fall from the mother potato is nothing compared to the shock of hitting the cold steel, which knocks a bit of the starch out of him. Dazed under the trickling tap, orphaned, bruised, and already despised, he is scooped up, dropped, and dragged out of the kitchen on a sticky heel. Half-conscious on the grass, washed over by waves of awakenings from the candlelit patio where well-connected guests from Toronto talk art and prize money, young Herbie soaks up big ambitions. Will he be the smartest Prince Edward Red ever, or just another pretentious phoney?

After absorbing the last of the art talk, the fully awake one-eyed Herbie, hunchback, staggers upright and dashes off into the dark to make it big - and skids straight into the pages of an old book of Edwardian nursery tales left open on the dewy grass.

'What makes this novel so brave and so original is exactly what would make it so difficult to publish.'

- Judy Clain, Little, Brown