The Life of Hope
The Life of Hope is a novel by Paul Quarrington, published in 1985 by Doubleday Canada. It is part of an unofficial trilogy with Quarrington's later novels "King Leary" and "Logan in Overtime"; although none of the novels centre on the same protagonists, they all feature some background interrelationships of character and setting. The novel's central character, essentially an authorial self-insertion, is a novelist named Paul who is suffering from writer's block after the publication of his baseball-themed novel "Home Game". Attending a writer's retreat in the small Southern Ontario  town of Hope, he learns about the town's history as a free love and nudist commune established by an expatriate American cult leader named Joseph Benton Hope, which reignites his creativity as he begins to write a fictionalized account of the town's establishment. The novel was a shortlisted finalist for the Stephen Leacock Award in 1986.