Book Club: Nova Scotia House
Charlie Porter's debut novel immerses us into love and life in London.
Published in 2025, Nova Scotia House is the debut novel from Charlie Porter - a fashion journalist who lives in London.
What's it about?
Johnny is 19. He's moved to London to go to college and is struggling to find his place in the world. At a communal gardening project, he meets Jerry. Their relationship begins and Johnny moves into Jerry's flat in Nova Scotia House.
Jerry is 45. Jerry is HIV-positive. Johnny and Jerry's relationship coincides with the last four years in which HIV was an untreatable illness.
In the summer of 1995 - just months before effective combination therapies become available - Jerry dies.
Twenty-six years later, Johnny is still living in Jerry’s flat but the rising tide of gentrification means that Johnny is faced with difficult decisions about how to move forward with his life.
The stream-of-conscious narrative from Johnny's perspective and the blended timeline of the unfolding story gives this memorialisation of an era a hallucinatory or dream-like quality.
What themes does the novel explore?
- Intergenerational relationships: As inspiration for Johnny and Jerry, Porter has drawn on the relationship of Derek Jarman and Keith Collins. We see Jerry nurturing and mentoring Johnny, while Johnny finds safety and security with Jerry. In the final years of his life, Jerry finds purpose in being a father-figure to Johnny - passing on knowledge and his perspective on the world.
- Community: The community that surrounds Jerry is contrasted with the physical and emotional wasteland of the broader city. There is a strong sense of chosen-family in what Jerry and Johnny have built together along with the people in their orbit.
- Grief: Johnny becomes paralysed by his grief after Jerry's death. He seems unable to move on with his life - he remains living in Jerry's house, maintaining Jerry's garden, continuing Jerry's traditions, unable to find any agency to become his own person.
- Contemporary dating and hook-up app culture: The transactional nature of Johnny's sexual encounters in the contemporary world of hook-up apps is contrasted with the seemingly more meaningful encounters he experienced as a younger man.
- Gentrification of London: In the 80s and 90s, London seemed to turbo-charge its development projects - generally at the expense of local communities.
- Memorialisation: Although focused on the day-to-day lives of people impacted by the AIDS pandemic, this is a story that deliberately memorialises an era that for younger generations will feel like a different world. As well as the harsh realities the lives ruined by the virus, the novel also captures the dark humour and the moments of joy that help to lighten bleak experiences.
Why is this an important novel for gay men?
This is a story that brings to life the pain and heartache of the AIDS epidemic but also highlights the sense of community and dark humour of people finding a way to live through that time.
It's stream-of-consciousness style allows us to walk in the shoes of the men with survivor guilt - navigating a world in which the absence of the generations that came before them is keenly felt.
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