Nova Scotia House by Charlie Porter
Review by Rachel Shaver
8/17/25
“[Jerry’s] death, it was here, death present before death, death present for days, weeks, his death in the room with us, his death making its demands of his body, his death in charge now, it held sway, entering him through pain, sat up in bed knees up what was left of his body full clench, as if Jerry was trying to push something out of him, to push out death, but death had taken its hold. Jerry grabbed my hand he gripped me he gripped me he released, a pause, summoning his powers, whatever powers he had left, trying to push out the death that was him and he was death.”
Charlie Porter’s Nova Scotia House reads like a novel in verse, and in a way, that’s exactly what it is. Told as a kind of diary, it follows Johnny Grant’s life thirty years after the death of the only man he has ever loved, Jerry Field. Their time together was short, but the relationship lives on long past Jerry’s death from AIDS.
Johnny still lives in Jerry’s flat—1, Nova Scotia House—all these years later, like a museum of the years they shared. It has become a personal refuge, a comfort in a time of unimaginable pain. The book opens, “Let me sort through who I am. Won’t take long.” And this is true: Nova Scotia House is a quick read, made quicker by its prosaic style. Porter strips away conventional punctuation and syntax, creating something closer to a tour of Johnny’s mind. It is fragmented, at times rambling, and it bends memory and the present around one city that, for Johnny, seems to exist only to remind him of Jerry. Johnny’s life without Jerry is tangibly lonely. The quiet of Johnny’s daily routine is at times devastating, but always beautifully depicted.
“Cut back the hellebore leaves. So brutal. Right down to the bottom. Jerry would say pretend it's dead. They are last year's leaves, they've done their work, they still want to hang around, if I let them hang around there'll be less flowers, I cut the leaves to force it to flower, gardening is a trick, it is gruesome.
Some of these hellebores were planted with Jerry, I planted them, Jerry told me what to do, by then he was too weak. His mind was just as brutal. Pretend it's dead.”
Tangled in Johnny’s grief is the relentless change of the world outside. If there is one force driving the novel, it is that the city will not stop remaking itself. Johnny describes it as “bombed,” not by war but by erasure. Old buildings leveled, replaced by flats and corporate towers. Soon, a new development will block the light from Jerry’s beloved garden that Johnny still tends to today. The thought of moving on both physically from the flat and emotionally from Jerry feels impossible.
The city’s transformation becomes an unspoken metaphor for the cultural “moving on” from the AIDS epidemic. Johnny watches as the world carries forward before he is ready, burying wounds still open. In life, Jerry stood against oppression, against the rising norm of capitalism and what the world deemed acceptable in the 90s. Johnny is saved from that very path of normalcy by Jerry and credits him for his awakening. But Johnny is left to sort through what he learned in the short time he had with Jerry, desperate to live in the same way.
“l used to think how we lived was so pioneering, such radicals, but now I realize that we were doing what humans have done for millennia, living communally, in groups. It is only in this very recent history that we have become so segregated and so removed from one another, and this forces those of us who believe in communality to be seen as militant.”
Nova Scotia House is a love story, but it’s also a document of queer culture and queer history. It is unafraid of the political undercurrent of a gay relationship in the 90s. Porter writes of gay life as an act of standing against erasure, an insistence on truly living. By the book’s end, the reader feels the meaning of life Jerry so often speaks of, the line that threads through everything: “Continuity, acceptance, bravery, vulnerability, patience, anger, insight, pleasure, care, beauty, stubbornness. It is love it is love it is love.”
Porter’s writing is simple, quick and concise, and almost exclusively allows scene to speak for itself, with Johnny’s reflection at the heart of it. It is through this that the relationships feel so profound and moving, even when the majority of this novel is set in a time where Jerry and Johnny’s relationship has already ended, and not even recently. But Jerry and Johnny are not the only characters who come alive on the page. Porter also introduces the world of friends and family who knew Jerry. Because his loss ripples outward, far beyond Johnny, carried by everyone who came and went from his life.
“We must live with our wounds, Fiona is saying, the wounds that are so open to us, so raw, but others do not see our wounds, others want us to move on, and to forget.
Others want us to seek comfort in forgetting. To seek solace in forgetting. To forget would be to assimilate. We live with our wounds they never close.
We sew we sew we are silent we are within ourselves with each other, Fiona with Rosie, me with Jerry, Jerry my love my wound my all.
In the end, Porter leaves us with no false consolation. The world keeps spinning after tragedy; this is, somehow, both devastating and comforting. Late in the novel, there is a scene where Johnny visits the HIV quilt exhibit, accompanied surprisingly by real pictures of quilts on display. This is an artful choice, a simple reminder that this work of fiction is far less fabricated than it may seem. But the world has carried on, leaving these stories behind, and it will continue to do so, and only the memories will remain.
Rating: ★★★★★
Beautifully poetic and historically significant. Book annotators, beware, this is the kind of book that leaves you with something memorable in each line. Get your highlighters ready!
About the reviewer:
Rachel Shaver graduated from Eckerd College with a BA in creative writing and a minor in literature. She lives in Tampa, Florida with her twin sister and spends her days consuming media in all forms. She has been published in Collision Literary Magazine and worked as editor-in-chief for Eckerd Review, as well as editorial intern for Cleaver Magazine.
About the author:
Charlie Porter is a writer, fashion critic and curator. He has written for the Financial Times, the Guardian, The New York Times, GQ, Luncheon, i-D and Fantastic Man, and has been described as one of the most influential fashion journalists of his time. Porter co-runs the London queer rave Chapter 10, and is a trustee of the Friends of Arnold Circus, where he is also a volunteer gardener. He lives in London.
