NOVA SCOTIA HOUSE News
It has been incredible to see the powerful effect that Charlie Porter’s debut novel Nova Scotia House has been having on people since it was published last month.
There were a raft of good reviews…
“This is a book that works both as a tribute to those who died of the cruellest disease, and as a more general lament to love, loss and remembrance. It is profoundly, bracingly human.”
“As he starts a new life outside London, Porter offers the reader a utopian glimpse of pre-Aids queer culture being born again, and of anger and grief turning into possibility.”
… and many booksellers kept it front and centre of their new fiction displays for several weeks.
Many thanks to Hatchards for making it their Novel of the Month in April. You can listen to Charlie on the Hatchards Podcasthere, and Hatchards Piccadilly hosted him for a conversation with Peter Parker on 30 March.
The Piccadilly shop has had an amazing window display, which includes Charlie’s notebooks and a lamp from furniture makers Frick and Frack, part of the radical 80s London collection House of Beauty and Culture, which Charlie writes about inthis piece.
All ofCharlie’s pieces about the inspiration for the novel are exciting to read, opening up a world of creativity and experiment in living that was painfully curtailed by the AIDS crisis.
The giant quilt that was made in the 1980s to remember people who died of AIDS in Britain, and which is referenced in the novel, is going to be put on display from 12-16 June in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. You can read about the quilt inthis Guardian article.
Charlie will be speaking about it, and about Nova Scotia House, in a number of forthcoming events that you can discoverhere.
And today we have the exciting news that the US publisher Nightboat have acquired the novel for publication in North America on 21 October 2025!
