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Description
A National Post Bestseller!
A multi-faceted story that explores how small actions and changes can give rise to startling and unintended consequences.
Trajectory. Declination. Impact. Escape Velocity. These are rocketry terms that could also describe aspects of the human experience.
A lumberjack obsessed with space travel loses four different wedding rings, and each of the lost rings symbolizes something different to the person who finds it.
There are the members of a rich family whose dramas overlap with those of the homeless people living right next door, under the bridges of the Rosedale Ravine. The wheelchair-bound teen who declares war on a man parking his luxury car in the handicapped parking spot. The would-be rock star selling insurance, whose terminal diagnosis sets his life on a new and dizzying path.
And many others. Every person is connected to every other — genetically, coincidentally, necessarily, or randomly. Every action has a consequence, seen or unseen, from the sublime to the catastrophic.
Contributor Notes
Richard Scarsbrook is the author of eight books, including The Indifference League. His short stories and poems have appeared in Descant, The Dalhousie Review, Prairie Fire, Matrix, The Toronto Quarterly, and the NeWest Review. He teaches creative writing courses at George Brown and Humber Colleges, and is a mentor for the Humber School for Writers Correspondence Program. He lives in Toronto.
Editorial Reviews
Such a fun ride … Each story weaves from one to another and it is fun putting them all together.
— Coffee and Books
what I loved most about this book was how it all came together, how all the characters were connected in some way, which, as I see all the time, isn’t that unrealistic.
— Book Time
Creates its own small universe of hope, frustration, love, lust, tragedy, and comedy. Each chapter adds to a quirky wholeness, forming a haunting pattern evocative of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.
— ForeWord Reviews
Rockets Versus Gravity was a good read, it took me less than a day to read it because I was so curious to see where it was going to go. I loved getting to read a book set in Toronto and small-towns much like my own
— Broken Pencil
Expertly weaves these seemingly unrelated characters into one larger story — a technique reminiscent of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad. Scarsbrook portrays these characters so vividly that the reader cannot help but empathize with them.
— Novella Magazine
Scarsbrook provides readers with a mosaic—a series of narratives that straddle the line between a full-fledged novel and a collection of interlocking short stories. Embracing ideas of synchronicity and chaos theory, Scarsbrook jumps around in time and place
— Subterrain
