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 Als

This 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 Hoare

I 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 Laing

This is going to blow reader’s minds. Intense, physical, true

Paul Flynn

Nova Scotia House is just extraordinary. To read it is life-changing

Chantal Joffe

I 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

As the darkest days of the UK AIDS epidemic recede into history, how can we keep on learning from what happened to all of us, back then ? Charlie Porter’s first novel is a fierce and tender answer. In fresh and vivid prose, he takes us right to the heart of a world filled with love, loss - and courage

Neil Bartlett

It’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 Myles

Beautifully 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 McBride

Nova 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 Gluck

I 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 Dinan

Sparse, soaring, instantly elegiac … Unlike anything I’ve ever read

Hannah Dawson

Moving and refreshing...Flashbacks provide glimpses of [a] relationship; past and present are woven through with desire, grief and love. Porter's optimism and the way his narrative opens up to the future are welcome ... And amid the current glut of novels about partying, Porter, who co-ran the queer rave Chapter 10, has written the most stylish club scene this reader has encountered in a long while

Literary Review

Exhilarating, risk-taking, life-affirming … Porter offers the reader a utopian glimpse of pre-Aids queer culture being born again, and of anger and grief turning into possibility

Neil Bartlett, Guardian

Some books are unforgettable. This is one of them

Charlee Brooks (Substack)

Sublime

Jon Paul Roberts, Buying the Flowers Myself (Substack)

A tender tale of gay love and loss … it’s got hookups of every persuasion

BUTT Magazine

Nova Scotia House finds its rhythm in an era of the AIDS crisis that has been less focused upon, delicately weaving together queer lives lived before, during, and long after it ... [it] asks both its reader and its author: How can we connect again with radical queerness and countercultural ideas of living? How can we live life as fully, optimistically, and queerly as possible?

Anna Cafolla, Vogue

A beautiful book, angry and elegiac, hopeful and romantic, and very moving … This is muscular writing, and a reminder that when it’s done well a literary novel can take you to places you’ve never been and wouldn’t otherwise be able to go. Queer magic, as Jerry would say

Esquire

Profoundly, bracingly human … Porter has conjured such intensity here, and such tangibly real characters, that it feels like the gospel truth

Nick Duerden, Observer

Evocative and exhilarating … Nova Scotia House is a story of life-affirming—and altering—love … Whoever you are, this is a book that will sear through—and uplift—you

Chris Creegan, Prospect

Porter’s novel is a pleasing celebration of how gardening, queer lives and the Aids crisis intertwined … a slim but potent love story

Alice Vincent, New Statesman

Intriguing … [Nova Scotia House is] about seeing and being seen. It’s about British society. It’s about life lived between the potential of youth and the eradication of that potential at life’s end. It’s about what remains after that

ArtReview, Mark Rappolt

Charlie Porter's Nova Scotia House is an actual masterpiece of longing, cruising, going out dancing, the then & now of AIDS, the pentimento of living in rooms marked by lust & loss, queer solidarity under capitalism, utopian dreaming, the apps, the future. I don't think I will ever get over this book

Andrea Lawlor

Nova Scotia House recalls an era when gay liberation was an open, expansive, radical field of possibilities. It's a bitter-sweet love letter to a lost era, seen through the eyes of a younger man, recalling his love for an older mentor and friend. As if that wasn't enough, it's also a book about cities, and the kind of life they used to afford, back when we could afford it

McKenzie Wark

Nova Scotia House has all the markings of a modern queer classic. It conjures the past with powerful immediacy, and asks how we may channel our histories to survive the present. With hypnotic prose, the book illuminates the possibility for hope beyond grief, for life beyond death, and for a future filled with radical queer utopias

Jonathan Parks-Ramage

What a wondrous gift Charlie Porter has given us. Nova Scotia House is a gorgeous, aching, profound novel about AIDS, art, grief, time, memory, sex, desire, and love. The spell of Charlie Porter’s language, the mesmerizing flow and rhythms of his sentences, transported me into an intimate dream space that I didn’t want to leave

Carter Sickels

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 Als

I 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 Laing

This 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 Hoare