SPLITSVILLE

A bookseller's love affair, start to finish, against the backdrop of a city in protest.

It's 1971. Hal Sachs runs a used bookstore. Business isn't so great, and the store is in a part of Toronto that's about to be paved over with a behemoth expressway. And then Hal meets Lily Klein, an activist schoolteacher who'll do just about anything to stop the highway. It's love at first sight. Until it isn't. And then Hal vanishes.

A half-century later, Hal's nephew, Aitch, waits for his baby to be born as he tries to piece together facts and fictions about Hal's disappearance.

Splitsville is a diamond-cut love letter to a city whose defining moment was to say 'no way' to a highway, and a look at the obsessions that carry down through a family.

Howard Akler is the author of The City Man, which was shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Prize, and the City of Toronto Book Award, and Men of Action, an essay about consciousness and fatherhood, also nominated for the City of Toronto Book Award.