Understanding Ken

#1 Amazon Bestseller in Hockey

"The best and funniest book about growing up in Canada and playing hockey. Period."—Ray Ferraro, Former NHL All-Star

In 1973 small-town British Columbia, a ten-year-old hockey fanatic lives for one thing: the Montreal Canadiens and their towering goaltender, Ken Dryden. When Dryden suddenly quits the NHL to go to law school, the boy’s world shatters—on and off the ice.

Between the pipes of childhood and the blue lines of adulthood, he's trying to make the rep team, understand why his divorcing parents scream at each other, survive his mom's furious boyfriend, and make sense of a world where people who love each other can't stop hurting each other, parents lose their minds at hockey games, kids ride their Mustang bike in the middle of winter, dogs chase cars, and heroes walk away from the game they're best in the world at.

First published to wide acclaim—an Ottawa Citizen Best Book of the Year and a Stephen Leacock Award nominee—the Toronto Star said: "Understanding Ken has captured not only the spirit of a magical time in our nation's game, but the magic and innocence of childhood itself."

Told entirely in the unforgettable voice of a kid who knows every stat in the NHL but almost nothing about why adults do what they do, Understanding Ken is hilarious, heartbreaking, and utterly alive. It’s a love letter to 1970s Canada, to backyard rinks and Hockey Night in Canada, and to the fragile, resilient dreams of childhood.

For anyone who ever worshipped a player, memorized every stat, or clung to a childhood dream a little too long, this is a novel about the moment you realize the adults don’t have it figured out either—and how, somehow, you keep believing the right answers might just be one win away.

"Destined to become a classic." —Bill Richardson