Oh my goodness. What a roller coaster read; this pulled at my heart strings and snapped a couple along the way. I wept more than once at the overwhelming sadness as Johnny reflects upon his life without Jerry. Set at the height of the AIDS tragedy, Jerry is much older and dying. Nova Scotia House was their home together, living a lifestyle they chose and Johnny reflects upon their time together.

It’s a while since I read a stream of consciousness novel. Bolaño used this narrative style in one of his shorter novels and it worked very well. I found it easy to absorb the words without the usual grammatical conventions and it really added to the flow as Johnny’s grief and outpourings are documented. But this isn’t in any way downbeat. It’s a homage to love, commitment, friendship and more. It’s takes powerful writing to hit the emotions hard and Charlie Porter has done so in spades. I rarely return to titles, but feel there’s so much more in this story that I may have missed on a single read, I’ll be going back to it. It’s haunting and I hope it’s selected for awards. Just brilliant.

Told through a stream of consciousness narrator,Johnny, who looks back at a doomed relationship with an older man at the later stages of HIV. They have shared the heartbreak of love which cannot have a future, but they have a connection which endures. This is a love story, albeit unfulfilled, as Johnny looks for physical connections elsewhere, and lives a life which can feel uncomfortably raw and meaningless. The gay sex scenes are explicit and numerous, and not for the faint hearted, but ultimately show us the difference between these animal urges and an enduring emotional attachment. The language can be stilted and monotonous, but it shows the confusion and desperation felt by Johnny, at the end of the day who is just a young gay man in a world being ripped apart by prejudice and disease. He is supported by friends, and they have to be his salvation.

This book made me sob and it made me think, and yet it has a wonderful lightness to it, thanks to the free-flowing prose. It's essentially a love letter, and you just can't help but fall in love with Jerry as well. My favourite parts are all the conversations between Jerry and his friends and his lover, Johnny. Jerry seems to be speaking directly to us, and urgently, with Johnny as his messenger.
More fiction from Charlie Porter, please!

1 Nova Scotia House is the shared flat of Jerry and Johnny. Jerry and Johnny are keen to live a self-sufficient lifestyle by growing their own food and living very frugally. Set at the height of the HIV epidemic we learn quite early on that Jerry has HIV and this story follows Jerry and how he faces life with the disease and subsequently Johnny learning to live without the love of his life.

I have never read a book written in this style before, I struggled initially with around the first third, the punctuation is messy and I found I had to be really focused to absorb the writing style - I have later learned that this style of writing is known as "stream of consciousness" which is a narrative style that tries to capture a character's thought process in a realistic way often incorporating sensory impressions, incomplete ideas and rough grammar. Once I was used to the writing style I actually loved it and became totally engrossed in the book and Johnny and Jerry's story.

It is an emotional rollercoaster of a read, it highlights the prejudice faced by the gay community, not just socially but also medically and at the same time beautifully captures the friendship/found family that was born from that prejudice.

Once you get your head around the writing style it is a wonderful read which I would highly recommend. I have seen on Instagram that Charlie Porter is narrating the audiobook and I am interested to hear this writing style narrated, I think it would be completing compelling.

A really moving novel about love and grief.

The writing style took a while to get the hang of, but it doesn’t take away from the emotion of the book and what is a truly beautiful (although heartbreaking) story.

Quite a hard book to read due to the writing style. It did get easier the more I got used to it. An emotional story which brough up many feelings about how badly people with HIV were treated. I found I had tears in my eyes a few times.

4.5⭐

A beautiful and devastating story of queer love and loss. Told in a stream-of-consicousness style, Nova Scotia House tells the story of Johnny and his parter and love of his life, Jerry, and their brief but brilliant time together. This one took me a minute to get into and understand the flow of the unique writing style, but once I did, I was hooked. I'm often drawn to stories that deal with grief, and this one handled that facet extremely well, touching on the impact of the AIDS epidemic on both an intimate, personal level, and within the queer community at large. Nova Scotia House is equal parts devastating as it is hopeful, which makes for a raw, bittersweet story that will stick with me for some time.

a beautiful and devastating novel about life prior and post AIDS and HIV pandemic. The writing style reflects grief, loss, hope, love. It took me a while to get into the book and I had to reread a lot of pages, however once I was into it I was hooked.

A book about love, hope, pain and grief. Jonny meets the glamorous vivacious Jerry who is significantly older than him. Soon they are inseparable as Jerry shows Jonny the beauty of life. Their relationship is one of respect as each other is free to seek sexual relations outside of the home. Through Jerry’s stories, we are given insight into a life that society rejects. People who do not subscribe to the norm because of their sexual orientation. Instead, they move around underground on the outskirts. Taking over warehouses they build communities where everyone looks after one another as well as sleeping with each other.

The book covers the HIV and AIDS epidemic and we see the loss and pain that spreads throughout a community that feels invisible to those who have the power to develop drugs that could be potentially lifesaving.

Porter opens with Jonny packing up the house he shared with Jerry and ends with him leaving to live a life that refuses to die as London undergoes regentrification. There is a real sense of alienation and isolation throughout as the characters live in fear when simply walking down streets. The threat of attack or abuse is very real.

This is a book that will pull on your heart strings largely due to the fact that it happened. Yes, this is a book of fiction but so many elements are true. Who could not fall in love with these colourful characters.

Thank you NetGalley and Penguin Press Uk for the opportunity to read this ahead of publication.

This is published on the monthly book page at media, arts and culture magazine outsideleft,com - here: https://outsideleft.com/main.php?updateID=3395#charlie-porter
NOVA SCOTIA HOUSE
by Charlie Porter
(Particular Books)
Charlie Porter wowed with 'What Artists Wear' - as he picked through the closets of artists you love for their look. Charlie got the details. With an exacting ability to connect work with wear, for his sighting of signs we don't see, so much so that Olivia Dean in the Guardian newspaper imagined Porter as a kind of "punk cousin to John Berger." I loved 'What Artists Wear' so much that I gave it away several times. Now we have Porter's debut novel. Nova Scotia House will be available on March 20th. A story of loss and grief, sex and love, and refusing to relinquish dreams, Charlie's publisher says. He said he would understand if it was too much for me, that I could leave him, that I was young, I should be living, I said to him, I am living. Johnny Grant faces stark life decisions. Seeking answers, he looks back to his relationship with Jerry Field. When they met, nearly thirty years ago, Johnny was 19, Jerry was 45. "Nova Scotia House takes us to the heart of a relationship, a community and an era. It is both a love story and a lament; bearing witness to the enduring pain of the AIDS pandemic and honouring the joys and creativity of queer life." Can't wait to be sad. (Ancient Champion)

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

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

This is a truly excellent novel about grief and the passage of time. It's all about losing-loved ones, youth, the vibrant queer world that existed before the AIDS epidemic-yet it strikes a somewhat hopeful tone; that things can endure, that there is hope for new ways of radical living, and the events that shape us will continue to do so in ways we might not imagine.

(I am also planning to write about it for my march newsletter on Substack)

I spent my life doing everything I could to fight normality and where do we find ourselves. Normality. What a vic-tor-y. Dear, did you get any biscuits, I would love a biscuit.
There are biscuits, I got us biscuits.
Because of course normal men are all awful. To become one of them, to become normal, us queers need to be awful every moment of every day. (p. 55)

It's only January but I may have stumbled upon my favorite queer novel of 2025. It's hard nowadays to write fiction about the AIDS epidemic, considering that we're at remove of several of generations, ever intense neoliberal society of spectacle, and not least the newfound freedoms that have come with PrEP and other effective means of prevention. And therein lies the possibility of a contemporary politicisation of AIDS. Porter asks what we have forgotten, or rather what we have been forced to forget by trauma, by cisheterofascism, by spectacle. "To forget would be to assimilate," writes Porter (p. 209). Porter shows forms of living alongside the consumer cisheteronorm that were just beginning to emerge when the epidemic struck, and along with the personal loss of the main character, Johnny, we are also made to experience the loss of what might have been if these experiments had not only survived but thrived. An incredible novel of emotional and intellectual depth that came out of nowhere, and I'm sitting here completely blown away.

3.5 stars
A beautiful story about love, loss and grief. There were so many tender moments in this book, moments of joy and peace and anger as Johnny lives a life overshadowed by the death of Jerry. His relationship with Jerry, although it only lasted a few years, defined the rest of his life and there is so much beauty in this writing. This book gives a voice to those who were forgotten and lost during the AIDS crisis, and those who were left behind. It’s a poignant and heartbreaking story to read.

I have to admit, I did struggle a lot with the writing style. I found myself skimming sentences and having to go back and reread them to fully understand what was happening. But I also think this unique style works for this book, it acts as a continuous inner monologue of Johnny and his grief.

Charlie Porter's Nova Scotia House is an emotional powerhouse which details the AIDS crisis and how it impacts upon one man, Johnny, and his partner Jerry. The writing is strong, unique and distinctive, written from the point of view of Johnny. It is not always an easy read - as something on this subject is always going to be harrowing - but there are moments of joy and hope for life interspersed here that it's raised into something beautiful. A grand novel, and one to be savoured.

This was a very moving read. It took me a while to get used to the writing style and I found myself skimming over sentences and having to go back and read it properly. The writing style made me really have to slow down my reading. The story is heartbreaking and brutal, a true reflection of the heartbreak and brutality of the AIDS crisis. The section towards the end with the quilt was so poignant, and I was glad that the book ended how it did.

This was one of those books that I just knew was going to stay with me before I even started reading. Charlie Porter has a very unique style of writing, with its repetition and fast paced-ness I couldn’t help but devour this book.

Nova Scotia House revolves around Johnny, his partner Jerry, their fabulous friends and the abundance of love they clearly have for one another. It is also set within the time of the AIDS pandemic, showing the struggle to be heard, be seen, the judgement that was passed and the devastating impact it had on so many people’s lives.

Throughout the book Johnny reflects on his relationship with Jerry, the decline of his health and the survivors guilt he feels. We see the wonderful human Jerry is through Johnny’s POV and I absolutely loved that he stood up for what he believed in. And quite frankly, took no shit. I honestly cannot imagine the pain of seeing your loved one go through that but Charlie Porter made me feel like I was experiencing this with the characters, the emotion jumps off the page and my heart ached at so many points of the book. I felt the anger. I felt the loss and I’m in awe at Charlie Porter’s ability to capture so much in just under 250 pages.

I’m not quite sure any review I write will do this one justice. It’s definitely one you’re going to have to read for yourself. There are moments of joy and hope inter-dispersed and this book is full of love, but be prepared, it’s most likely going to break your heart.

In "Nova Scotia House," Charlie Porter tells the story of Johnny, a forty-eight year old gay man who still mourns the death of his lover Jerry. Johnny was a young college student and Jerry was a much older HIV-positive man who was dying. The novel explores what it's like to be a survivor when so many around you died from a disease that was ignored and underfunded by the government. The mere act of persevering was a form of rebellion because the government's cruelty and homophobia indicated that they did not care if you lived or died.

Charlie Porter allows Johnny to reflect on that time, and how his lover Jerry had to carve out a whole new off-the-grid identity as a type of sexual outlaw. Through Johnny's memories, we hear from Jerry himself who serves as a Professor Higgins character who initiates Johnny into how to survive in a world that is antagonistic to your very identity as a person. As readers, we understand why Johnny was so drawn to Jerry. Johnny's memory version of Jerry is of a man who never compromised his ideals to live in the world. He refused to silence himself or allow others to dictate the way his life and death should go.

Porter not only details what it was like to live as a gay man, but he connects this with the survivors. How do you deal with the guilt and the grief when you're mourning a life you could have had? A life stolen from you by a disease. Porter offers moments of grace and respite from the grieving process and survivor's guilt. As Johnny begins to come out of the pain, Porter offers a sliver of hope for the character and for readers. In a 2024 world where anti=gay attitudes are on the rise, the hope is a nice balm to all the hatred in the current world.