{"product_id":"the-ravine-1","title":"The Ravine","description":"One morning in Don Mills, Phil and his brother Jay agree to let their friend Norman Kitchen tag along on an adventure down into a ravine — and what happens there at the hands of two pitiless\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003eteenagers changes all their lives forever. Years later the horrifying details are still unclear, smothered in layers of deliberate forgetting. Phil doesn’t even remember the names: Ted and Terry? Tom and Tony? It’s only when he descends into a crisis of his own that he comes to realize that perhaps, as he drunkenly tells a crisis line counsellor, “I went down into a ravine, and never really came back out.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Ravine\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eis Phil’s book — we read it as he types it, in the basement apartment he’s called home since his wife kicked him out for having an affair with a make-up girl. As he writes, and then corrects what he’s written, we hear how he went from promising young playwright to successful, self-hating TV producer. We listen in on his disastrous late-night phone calls, and watch his brother (once a brilliant classical pianist) weep to himself as he plays Ravel and \u003ci\u003eWaltzing Matilda\u003c\/i\u003e in a desolate bar. \u003cb\u003eThe Ravine\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003etells us all about the influence of \u003ci\u003eThe Twilight Zone\u003c\/i\u003e on Phil’s work and his life — how it helped him meet his wife Veronica and then lose her, and how it led to the bizarre\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003edeath of his friend, TV star Edward Milligan. Sometimes, when Phil’s drunk, a friend will look at what he’s written so far and call him on it — like when Jay tells Phil that he’s remembered it all wrong: that he was just as good as Phil at tying knots back when they were in the cubs. \u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePhil’s “ravine”\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eis his attempt to make sense of things, to try to understand how everything went so wrong just as it seemed to be going so right. But \u003cb\u003eThe Ravine\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eis also a Paul Quarrington novel, meaning that it’s hilarious and ingenious, quietly working its magic until the reader is at once heartbroken and hopeful. A darkly funny story about loss and redemption, \u003cb\u003eThe Ravine\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eis also about how stories are made — how they can pull us out of disasters that seem too much for anyone to bear — and about how, sometimes, what we need to forgive ourselves for is not what we think it is at all.","brand":"None","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":46227772997842,"sku":"9780307356154","price":19.95,"currency_code":"CAD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Kobo eBook","offer_id":46227773030610,"sku":"9d431854-ad2f-4f65-8528-ebe48ba6b899","price":13.99,"currency_code":"CAD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0655\/8980\/5233\/files\/1_568b6be9-0d85-4463-a038-03fce9caabe4.jpg?v=1763316055","url":"https:\/\/www.indigo.ca\/products\/the-ravine-1","provider":"Indigo","version":"1.0","type":"link"}