Finishing School: a novel

By Helen Fogwill Porter

Fiction
214 pages
$19.95, 6"x9" Paperback
ISBN-13: 978-1-895900-88-0
ISBN-10: 1-895900-88-3
(Available in April 2007)


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Forty-nine-year-old divorced hair stylist Eileen Novak has enrolled in a community college to complete her high school education. Her first English assignment is to keep a journal. Initially apprehensive about this exercise, Eileen soon discovers she enjoys writing and the opportunity to really let herself go.

Set in St. John's, Newfoundland, in the 1980s and resonating with a vivid sense of place, Finishing School chronicles Eileen's sometimes traumatic, sometimes funny but fully engaged life during the school months. "Always ready to try anything," Eileen says. She speaks frankly of the day-to-day events of her life that sometimes involve uncomfortable encounters, intimate moments and awkward revelations. She's free-speaking with her wisdom and opinions about the world in general and the people she has known through her life. Eileen is unpretentious and down-to-earth as she reveals her unique way of observing the world around her from her downtown working-class neighbourhood.

The cast of characters in Eileen's life include her three grown daughters, her stepfather Herb, her classmate Tom, her ex-husband Gary, her former boyfriend Bruce, her clients as well as her friends and enemies. Readers are sure to fall in love with this delightful and unlikely fictional heroine.



A native of St. John's, Newfoundland, where she still resides and where most of her work is set, Helen Fogwill Porter has been writing professionally for 35 years. Her material spans many genres, from fiction and poetry to drama and criticism. Published across Canada and internationally, Porter is particularly interested in regional speech and creating a vivid sense of place. Her previous books, published by Breakwater Books, include Below the Bridge, a memoir-history, and A Long and Lonely Ride, a short story collection. January, February, June and July, a novel, was short-listed for the W.H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award in 1989 and won the Young Adult Canadian Book Award that year. Finishing School is her second novel.