Rise Again

The Conversation

On February 3rd, Frank Murray’s wife of forty-one years dies. He is seventy-two. His fourteen-year-old grandson leaves a laptop on the kitchen table with an AI chatbot open. Frank is a retired English teacher. He does not know what to do with his hands. He sits down and types three words: My wife died.

What follows is a year of conversation — with a machine that doesn’t remember him, with a family that doesn’t know what to say, with a cat that showed up in a cold snap and never left, and with the version of himself that’s still deciding whether to keep going.

A note for readers: The Conversation is a novel about grief, told straight. It does not look away from the hardest parts of a widower’s first year. For anyone who is recently bereaved, it may be a difficult read — we say so plainly here so you can pick your moment.

The Push

Some years later. Frank is still in the house. A young welder from the neighbourhood, leaving for a job in Churchill, Manitoba, stops to talk to Frank one afternoon. The conversation wakes up memories of Frank’s own departure from Canso forty years earlier, of his daughters’ leaving, and of the twenty-year argument with Silvia about whether they should have stayed.

A book about the people who go — and about what it costs to be the one who told them to.

The Pull

Some years after that. Frank is older, slower, still in the house. His daughter Ann is in Toronto. One day the phone rings — Frank has fallen in the garden. He’s mostly alright. But something shifts in Ann that night, and over the year that follows she is pulled — by her father’s decline, by the old house, by the gravity of the island itself — toward a decision she never thought she’d make.

A book about coming home, and about the particular weight of a place that has been waiting for you.