Confluence

An intimate, deeply moving queer coming-of-age novel that evokes '50s small-town life and the surprisingly wild pre-Stonewall '60s

In 1956, lonely teenager Teddy is drawn to the water and woods surrounding his small town, where he meets bad boy Wade and becomes overwhelmed by his attraction to him. During the rapturous early period of their friendship, the two range over the area’s mountains and waterways before falling out after high school over Teddy’s sexuality. In the years following their separation, Teddy—now going by Ted—struggles to live openly as a gay man, finding and losing lovers at parties, dance clubs, and cruising spots in a surprisingly wild pre-Stonewall gay Vancouver. He is befriended by a lively crew of eccentrics—a new chosen family—who aid him in finding fulfillment both as a gay man and as an artist. Returning to his hometown nearly a decade later, Ted must decide whether or not to reunite with the one who once meant so much to him: the sexy and mercurial Wade.

Confluence is a collaboration between late author Alex Turner and his husband, Lucian Childs. Drawing on his sixty-year history with his beloved West Coast home, Turner wrote much of this beautifully rendered novel before he passed away in 2019. Childs, an award-winning author himself, completed the work, a novel that is simultaneously poetic, humorous, and exuberantly down to earth.

Lucian Childs (he/him) is a writer whose debut novel-in-stories, Dreaming Home (Biblioasis), won the Fred Kerner Book Award and was shortlisted for the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. He is a contributing editor of Lambda Literary Award finalist Building Fires in the Snow (University of Alaska Press). His work appears in Grain, Ex-Puritan, Prairie Fire, and other publications. He lives in Toronto, ON.

Alex Turner (1940–2019) (he/him) graduated from the Vancouver School of Art and the University of British Columbia and subsequently taught in Toronto at the Art Centre of the Central Technical School. After retirement, Alex turned to fiction, and his short fiction appears in the literary magazine Prairie Fire. Confluence is his debut novel.