Grown-Ups

He is the only author ever to have been a number one bestseller in fiction (nineteen times), short stories (four times) and non-fiction (The Prison Diaries).

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J. Patrick Boyer, Q.C., a journalist, author, lawyer, and professor, was an MP from 1984 to 1993, serving as Canada’s Parliamentary Secretary for External Affairs.

He holds an honours degree in economics and political science from Carleton University, a Master's degree in Canadian history from University of Toronto and a Doctor of Laws degree, also from University of Toronto. Boyer studied French-Canadian literature at University of Montreal, and international law at the Academy of the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

He was a partner in the Toronto law firm Fraser & Beatty, specializing in communications and electoral law, and also practiced law in the Western Arctic as a member of the Northwest Territories Bar. He was a founder and contributing columnist of Lawyer's Weekly newspaper. He wrote six legal texts on Canadian election law at federal, provincial, territorial, band council, and municipal levels.

He is the author of some 25 books, dozens of feature articles, and hundreds of newspaper columns. Boyer also owns and operates publishing houses "Muskoka Books" and "Blue Butterfly Books." In 2010 he consolidated Blue Butterfly's publishing operations with those of Dundurn Press.

Between Samuel Champlain’s first map in 1615 and today’s satellite images of Muskoka from outer space lies a centuries-long drama which proves that putting Muskoka on a map was neither easy nor simple.

In this second book of his MODERN HISTORY OF MUSKOKA series, author J. Patrick Boyer presents a parade of human endurance and ingenuity, the indispensable roles of First Nations, the role of military planners, treachery and betrayal, the aspiration of land developers, the relationship between First Nations and settlers, the unique Muskoka role of legendary Canadian map-maker David Thompson – and the mystery of his “lost” maps just when they were needed most for Muskoka settlement.

It is the full story, integrating global forces with local realities, including the tribulations of land surveyors endeavoring to subdivide raw Canadian Shield landscape into a neat grid, the challenges facing road-builders in the same terrain, governmental policies often in conflict, and the shift from logging and homesteading to a vacation economy which finally also put Muskoka on the continent’s social map.

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Kyoto, Japan, 1948. “Do not question. Do not fight. Do not resist.”

Such is eight-year-old Noriko “Nori” Kamiza’s first lesson. She will not question why her mother abandoned her with only these final words. She will not fight her confinement to the attic of her grandparents’ imperial estate. And she will not resist the scalding chemical baths she receives daily to lighten her skin.

The child of a married Japanese aristocrat and her African American GI lover, Nori is an outsider from birth. Her grandparents take her in, only to conceal her, fearful of a stain on the royal pedigree that they are desperate to uphold in a changing Japan. Obedient to a fault, Nori accepts her solitary life, despite her natural intellect and curiosity. But when chance brings her older half-brother, Akira, to the estate that is his inheritance and destiny, Nori finds in him an unlikely ally with whom she forms a powerful bond—a bond their formidable grandparents cannot allow and that will irrevocably change the lives they were always meant to lead. Because now that Nori has glimpsed a world in which perhaps there is a place for her after all, she is ready to fight to be a part of it—a battle that just might cost her everything.

Spanning decades and continents, Fifty Words for Rain is a dazzling epic about the ties that bind, the ties that give you strength, and what it means to be free.

Set in 1980s London, the story revolves around Charlie: young and reckless, and in love with his upstairs neighbour, the enchanting Miranda whose hidden, murky past hangs between them. He has spent his inheritance on the acquisition of one of twenty-five highly developed new robotic humans--named Adam or Eve, each one beautiful, strong and clever--developed by Alan Turing after his success on the legendary WW2 Enigma codebreaking machine. As London is consumed by the huge protests over England and Argentina's Falklands War and Margaret Thatcher's jingoistic ambitions, Charlie courts Miranda, and his Adam finds himself, inevitably, central to their affair.

Great novelist that he is, McEwan pulls us into the question of what it means to love, what makes us human in our fast-changing times, what might follow if a machine understands too well the human heart, and how precarious a construct is the world we live in and think we know.