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An intimate, deeply moving queer coming-of-age novel that evokes '50s small-town life and the surprisingly wild pre-Stonewall '60s
In 1956, lonely teenager Teddy is drawn to the water and woods surrounding his small town, where he meets bad boy Wade and becomes overwhelmed by his attraction to him. During the rapturous early period of their friendship, the two range over the area’s mountains and waterways before falling out after high school over Teddy’s sexuality. In the years following their separation, Teddy—now going by Ted—struggles to live openly as a gay man, finding and losing lovers at parties, dance clubs, and cruising spots in a surprisingly wild pre-Stonewall gay Vancouver. He is befriended by a lively crew of eccentrics—a new chosen family—who aid him in finding fulfillment both as a gay man and as an artist. Returning to his hometown nearly a decade later, Ted must decide whether or not to reunite with the one who once meant so much to him: the sexy and mercurial Wade.
Confluence is a collaboration between late author Alex Turner and his husband, Lucian Childs. Drawing on his sixty-year history with his beloved West Coast home, Turner wrote much of this beautifully rendered novel before he passed away in 2019. Childs, an award-winning author himself, completed the work, a novel that is simultaneously poetic, humorous, and exuberantly down to earth.
"A queer West Coast Bildungsroman, Confluence brings readers back to a time before Stonewall, and before Vancouver bristled with mirrored towers. The story it tells is as touching as the novel's provenance. It simply teems with love—the unrequited, the joyously consummated, and for the authors, love undying."
—Caroline Adderson, author of A Russian Sister and A Way to Be Happy
"This remarkable act of twin authorship transports you to the thrill of desire at the water's edge and to an intimacy almost too personal to bear. It's a reminder that what hides something can also reveal it spectacularly. Run to Confluence. It will give you a lifetime of goosebumps."
—Daniel Allen Cox, author of I Felt the End Before It Came
"Confluence is a gushing hot spring of a novel, swirling with sex, self-discovery, and stories that bubble up to insist on being told. In its pages, gay men find community—and communion—through honouring the desires that bind them across vast distances of geography and time. Don't miss this exquisitely unique and heart-wrenchingly beautiful book."
—Matthew J. Trafford, author of Runs in the Blood
"Confluence, co-authored by Lucian Childs and his late husband, Alex Turner, is a gift. Many stories are held within this novel: a daring, taboo coming-of-age; an homage to the beautiful BC wilderness; a lively, little-known piece of queer Canadian history. Written with great care and feeling, it is also testament to a love between two men that transcends the ephemeral; I am heartened by their courage."
—Kristyn Dunnion, author of Stoop City
"Confluence captures beautifully the pre-Stonewall moment, but more than that, it is a vivid record of the time in a young queer person's life where desire is all and yearning, fear, and confusion are at their most powerful. It brings to mind the novels I searched for and rarely found as a queer kid, when I needed to see how other people had lived through it. A loving, warm, and turbulent page-turner."
—Richard Mirabella, author of Brother & Sister Enter the Forest
"Confluence is a slow burn. It teems with perfectly selected details and multi-layered dialogue to create extraordinary tension that climaxes in unexpected ways. I can't remember when I've become so fully immersed in fiction."
—Ken Harvey, author of The Book of Casey Adair
"A powerful novel—simply and directly told, with a great narrative engine and a fully realized emotional arc."
—Trevor Corkum, author of Here with You
"In Wade and Teddy, Turner and Childs have created two boys caught between instinct and fear, loyalty and self-preservation. Confluence is a powerful coming-of-age novel about masculinity, repression, and the devastating consequences of love that cannot safely speak its name."
—Danny Ramadan, author of The Foghorn Echoes
Lucian Childs (he/him) is a writer whose debut novel-in-stories, Dreaming Home (Biblioasis), won the Fred Kerner Book Award and was shortlisted for the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. He is a contributing editor of Lambda Literary Award finalist Building Fires in the Snow (University of Alaska Press). His work appears in Grain, Ex-Puritan, Prairie Fire, and other publications. He lives in Toronto, ON.
Alex Turner (1940–2019) (he/him) graduated from the Vancouver School of Art and the University of British Columbia and subsequently taught in Toronto at the Art Centre of the Central Technical School. After retirement, Alex turned to fiction, and his short fiction appears in the literary magazine Prairie Fire. Confluence is his debut novel.