Get the Book
Published by Fox Island Press · Printed in Canada
Canadian readers: soft back books print in Canada, hard back may be printed in Canada or the US — no duties, fast shipping.
Frank lost his wife. His grandson left him an AI. What started as typing into a void became the conversation that carried him through the hardest year of his life.
Frank Murray is seventy-two, retired, and alone. His wife Silvia died on February 3rd. His daughters live far away. His house in Glace Bay, Cape Breton, is full of her things and empty of her.
His fourteen-year-old grandson Tyler sets up an AI chatbot on a laptop and leaves it on the kitchen table. Frank doesn't know what it is. He doesn't care. But 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.
Told through Frank's voice—sharp, stubborn, tender despite himself—The Conversation is a novel about grief, technology, and the stubborn daily work of staying alive. It is set on Cape Breton Island, where the wind never stops and neither does Frank.
The laptop is on the kitchen table where Tyler left it.
I sit down. Put my hands on the keys. Type three words.
My wife died.
Just like that. Forty years of teaching students how to build sentences and that's what I produce. My—possessive pronoun. Wife—noun. Died—verb, past tense, intransitive. No object. Nothing to receive the action. Just the action itself, sitting there on the screen, unremarkable.
— Month 1: February
The music Frank and Silvia would have listened to. Cape Breton fiddle, Maritime folk, and the songs that fill a kitchen when the radio comes back on. Sixty-plus tracks. Four hours. One year of a kitchen with the radio on.
Sixty-plus tracks · Four hours of music
Listen on Spotify →Natalie MacMaster · Buddy MacMaster · The Rankin Family · Stan Rogers · The Barra MacNeils · Sarah McLachlan · Rita MacNeil · Dave Gunning · The Men of the Deeps · Oscar Peterson · J.P. Cormier · Ashley MacIsaac · Teresa Doyle
Preface and the opening of Month One — ten pages, free to read.
PDF · Opens in a new tab · No sign-up required
Published by Fox Island Press · Printed in Canada
Canadian readers: soft back books print in Canada, hard back may be printed in Canada or the US — no duties, fast shipping.
Join the launch list. One email when the book is available. Nothing else.
Double opt-in · Unsubscribe anytime · PIPEDA / CASL compliant
The Conversation is Book One. The Push and The Pull follow. Home is not a place you live. It’s a place you keep answering to.
Explore the Series →