The Master of Happy Endings

The Master of Happy Endings is a powerful new novel about memory, belonging, helping others, and the vagaries of the human heart. It is also a compelling story about how a man in his late seventies manages to conjure one more great adventure for himself.

Axel Thorstad lives in a shack on a remote island off the coast of British Columbia. Once a popular school teacher and thespian who touched the lives of hundreds of his students, he now lives in retirement and mourns the recent death of his wife.

But even this stoical giant of a 77-year-old finds the isolation too much. He begins to run want ads in newspapers offering his services as a tutor, and meets the indomitable Mrs. Montana. She hires Axel to coach her precocious teenage-TV-actor son Travis for his school exams while he shoots a new episode in Hollywood.  Life in L.A. is far removed from his isolated life in rural B.C., and soon Thorstad finds himself caught up in the drama of his young student’s life, and the return of an old flame.

Set amidst the fleshpots, sound-stages and dining rooms of L.A., this engaging novel of lives and loves lost and found also gestures to the courage one needs in the face of the vulnerabilities of older age that all too soon beset us.

“Hodgins has a rare gift for creating characters at once familiar and larger than life….Hodgins continues to live up to his billing as one of the finest storytellers in this or any other country.” (The Globe and Mail )

"...one of this country's great virtuoso writers." (The Vancouver Sun )

“An irresistible novel about the vagaries of youth, old age, Hollywood, family and the marvel of keeping going”. (Alice Munro )

Jack Hodgins was raised in Merville, on Vancouver Island. He has written seven novels and three short story collections, including Spit Delaney’s Island and The Invention of the World.  Hodgins’ fiction has won numerous awards, including the Governor General’s Award. He and his wife Dianne live in Victoria, BC.