Title: The hook of it is
First published: 1989
Description: According to author Philip Quinn:
The Hook of It Is was published in 1989 on cheap paper stock that has gradually turned brown but it is still an audacious, tour de force novel about the city of Toronto and its inhabitants capturing a certain time period, namely the late 1980s, but also digging deeper to reveal in often sadly funny ways how we're all addicted to our little human games.

 I keep it close at hand and usually somewhere near the novel Fat City written by Leonard Gardner.


It's a shame that people trot out the usual suspects when they're asked to recommend a book of fiction about Toronto.  Instead they should suggest The Hook of It Is for the emotional honesty/writing integrity that's on every page and its brilliant imagery: "slaps the alarm off and cracks open a can of cheap sunshine". A classic scene that will stay with the reader is the description of the Indian winos 'performing their dips and dives' in front of a downtown bank. I remember thinking at the time of my first reading that it was like a successor work to Cohen's Beautiful Losers, as if the narrator/scholar had finally gotten over his dead wife and taken the train from Montreal to Toronto. 
The Hook of It Is was published in 1989 on cheap paper stock that has gradually turned brown but it is still an audacious, tour de force novel about the city of Toronto and its inhabitants capturing a certain time period, namely the late 1980s, but also digging deeper to reveal in often sadly funny ways how we're all addicted to our little human games.

 I keep it close at hand and usually somewhere near the novel Fat City written by Leonard Gardner.


It's a shame that people trot out the usual suspects when they're asked to recommend a book of fiction about Toronto.  Instead they should suggest The Hook of It Is for the emotional honesty/writing integrity that's on every page and its brilliant imagery: "slaps the alarm off and cracks open a can of cheap sunshine". A classic scene that will stay with the reader is the description of the Indian winos 'performing their dips and dives' in front of a downtown bank. I remember thinking at the time of my first reading that it was like a successor work to Cohen's Beautiful Losers, as if the narrator/scholar had finally gotten over his dead wife and taken the train from Montreal to Toronto.