THREE YEARS WITH THE RAT

Evocative of Danielewski's House of Leaves, Hosking's page-turning debut is at once a mind-twisting mystery that hinges on the very nature of time and identity and the powerful story of a young man who must face the dangerously destructive force he carries within himself

When a young man's best friend and sister go missing, he finds a mystery waiting for him in their apartment: a wooden box big enough for a person to crawl inside, a note that says “This is the only way back for us,” and a lab rat as the only witness.

After several years of drifting between school and go-nowhere jobs, a young man makes a decision to return to the city he left after high school. The magnet is his beloved older sister, Grace: always the golden girl, smart and charismatic even when she was rebelling, and his hero. Now she is a promising graduate student in science and the centre of a group of friends that take “Little Brother” into their fold, where he finds camaraderie, romance, and even a decent job.

But it soon becomes clear that all is not well with Grace. Typically sharp, she now veers into sudden rages, often directed at her seemingly adoring boyfriend, John, who is engaged in the same field of research. Her accusations of betrayal are cryptic, and her brother is especially confused and troubled when she turns on him, accusing him of a fatal disloyalty. A visit to their mother triggers an episode that suggests Grace has tumbled into serious mental illness—except that John seems to know more than he is telling, and some supposedly objective certainties about what is real seem to be starting to fracture.

When Grace disappears, the narrator embarks on a mission to discover the truth, a quest that brings him up against an astonishing question: if the universe is infinite, could there be infinite variations of ourselves, past, present, and future, in a dimension only a few can even imagine? And if there are, and we could enter that dimension, what might confront us? And could we ever make it back?

This kinetic novel catapults the classic noir plot of a woman gone missing and a web of secrets and lies revealed into the 21st century city, where so-called reality crashes into speculative science in a provocative, genre-bending and page-turning debut.

JAY HOSKING obtained his neuroscience Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia, teaching rats how to gamble and studying the neurobiological basis of choice. At the same time, he also completed a creative writing MFA. His short stories have appeared in The Dalhousie Review and Little Fiction, been long-listed for the CBC Canada Writes short story competition and received an editor's special mention in the Pushcart Prize anthology. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, where he researches decision making and the human brain.