The Fearsome Particles

Trevor Cole’s bestselling debut novel garnered rave reviews and comparisons to Truman Capote and Kingsley Amis. Now the Governor General’s Award finalist is back with The Fearsome Particles, a brilliantly observed comic tragedy about the widening cracks in a family’s picture-perfect veneer.

Gerald Woodlore, a window screen executive, wakes one morning to find, to his utter dismay, that he has reached the limits of what he can control. The company he works for is rapidly losing market share and a junior assistant seems to be the only one with an idea how to fix it. His wife, Vicki, a luxury real-estate dresser, appears to be bending under the pressures of constructing an image of perfect happiness both at work and at home. But most worrying of all is Gerald and Vicki’s twenty-year-old son, Kyle, who quit school to volunteer with the military’s civilian support staff in Afghanistan. Now he has returned early and retreated to his room in the wake of a mysterious and traumatic event.

With his trademark wit and strong emotional insight, Trevor Cole has created a compelling, tender story that captures a family at a crucial turning point.

The Fearsome Particles has recently been optioned for film.


From the Hardcover edition.

Trevor Cole was lauded in a recent Globe and Mail review as “one of the best young novelists in this country.” He has written two novels – Norman Bray in the Performance of His Life (2004), and The Fearsome Particles (2006) – both of which, in a rare event, were short-listed for the Governor-General’s Award for Literature and long-listed for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Norman Bray was also short-listed for the regional Commonwealth Writer's Prize for Best First Book, and each of his novels has been adapted for radio and optioned for film. Recently, The Fearsome Particles was added to the syllabus of a Canadian literature course at Whitman College in Washington, taught alongside works by Michael Ondaatje, Tomson Highway, Alice Munro and Carol Shields. And in the spring of 2008, Cole will be the Edna Staebler Writer in Residence at the Kitchener Public Library.

In addition to being a novelist, Cole is also a veteran magazine journalist and editor. He worked for 12 years as a senior or executive editor in the magazine division of the Globe and Mail before spending three years as a senior writer for Report on Business Magazine. For his work there, as well as his in-depth features for Toronto Life magazine and his notorious satirical column for Canadian Business, he has won a total of seven National Magazine Awards (gold and silver) and 21 nominations, in addition to several other prizes. While continuing to work as a magazine journalist and fiction author, he also contributes to Canada’s literary community through AuthorsAloud.com, his growing website of literary readings by Canadian authors. He currently lives in Hamilton and is at work on his third novel.