About the book
A novel about a self-made Toronto developer, the niece who knew a completely different man, and the morning the city woke up to find he had vanished.
Toronto knew Donnie P. before it knew what to make of him.
He arrived from a mountain town in Italy by way of a train from Halifax, in patched jeans, with a paper route and a plan, and he did not stop moving for fifty years. He built along a waterfront the city had not yet learned to want. He put his name on towers, managed a band because he liked being near the music, and moved through boardrooms, construction sites and political lunches as though Toronto partly belonged to him. When a poll suggested he could take the mayor's office without running for it, the newscasters called him a flamboyant millionaire and he did nothing to correct them.
The night his niece Stefanie was born, his sister Corine died. Donnie was in the waiting room when the doctor came through the doors, and whatever love he had been carrying for his sister did not disappear with her — it went into the baby who survived her. For seventeen years Stefanie knew a man called Uncle Don: storybooks, birthday candles, afternoons in the park. She was nearly grown before she understood that the other man, the one in the newspapers, was the same person.
Donnie P. is the story of what happens when those two lives finally meet.
It begins at the end — reporters on the steps of City Hall, a mayor refusing to answer, and a question nobody in the family can answer either: where is he? Working back from that morning, the novel moves through a marriage built on the wrong things, a young man hired into the company for reasons he does not understand, an unmarked office one floor below the executive suite, and a boardroom where Donnie sets down four neat stacks of evidence and waits.
Along the way it is a book about an immigrant family in Toronto — Sunday tables crowded with pasta and argument, a father going quiet in a hospital bed, a brother-in-law who says the thing nobody else will. And it is about the particular loneliness of a man who has spent his whole life being certain, and who discovers, standing on a hillside in the town his father was born in, that he has been measuring the wrong things.
What you are walking into
A maternity ward, three men waiting, and a doctor who asks to speak outside. Stefanie arrives on the same night Corine leaves. Grief might have turned another man away from the child who survived — Donnie does the opposite, and everything that follows grows out of that decision.
Two lives, kept carefully apart. The developer in tailored suits who fills a room before he has said anything, and the uncle with a storybook across his knees. The novel is patient about how much effort it takes to be both, and how little of it anyone sees.
A new man at the executive table who is stripping the business bare, a twenty-two-year-old in an unmarked office who is very good with computers, and a private detective who returns a name that is not the name anyone was given. It builds to a boardroom, and it does not resolve the way anyone in the room expects.
A wedding the whole city attends. A marriage that was a negotiation from the first dinner. A doctor with an answer Donnie was given months earlier, in a room he never expected to see him in. The book is unsparing here, and it is where the family finally stops pretending.
A mountain town, a church bell, and the house where his father was born. Donnie goes looking for the beginning of the story and finds out what he has actually been building. It is the quietest section of the novel and the reason the rest of it is there.
The opening pages
Chapter One
The reporters descended on the steps of Toronto City Hall before the mayor had reached the bottom one.
Microphones rose above the crowd. Camera lights flooded the stone entrance, bleaching the colour from every face caught in their glare. Questions came from every direction, overlapping until they became a single frantic voice.
“Mr. Mayor!”
“Can you tell us what happened?”
“Where is he?”
“Is it true his wife disappeared?”
The mayor lowered his head and pushed forward without answering. His security detail opened a narrow passage through the reporters, but it closed again the instant he passed.
The cameras turned toward a man and a teenage girl emerging from the building behind him. They moved quickly, shielding their faces as the reporters crowded around them.
“Do you know where Donnie P. is?”
“Have you spoken to him?”
“Is his family in danger?”
Neither answered.
At the edge of the commotion, uniformed officers hurried an unidentified person into the back of a police cruiser. The door slammed, and the vehicle pulled away before the cameras could capture a clear view of its passenger.
A few moments later, the scene appeared on television sets across the city.
The newscaster looked solemnly into the camera.
“There you have it — the developing drama surrounding one of Toronto's most successful and eccentric entrepreneurs. It is a remarkable story, and it appears to be far from over. We will continue to bring you updates as information becomes available.”
An old photograph filled the screen.
Donnie P. stood in front of a newly completed building, smiling broadly, one hand raised as though he were greeting the entire city.
The image vanished.
“When we return: speculation involving the Royal Family, tonight's playoff scores, and further unrest overseas.”
The television went black.
For a moment, the dark screen held a faint reflection of the person who had switched it off.
Then even that disappeared.
The lake lay still beneath the sinking sun.
A small boat drifted across the water with no urgency and no destination that could be seen. Soft ripples touched its wooden sides.
A fishing line sailed through the air and disappeared beneath the golden surface.
A second line followed.
There were no reporters there. No cameras. No questions shouted by strangers who believed every life could be reduced to a headline.
Only water, sky and silence.
People thought they knew Donnie P.
They knew the millionaire whose photograph appeared in newspapers. They knew the businessman who built towers, shook hands with politicians and moved through Toronto as though the city belonged partly to him. They knew the larger than life figure who could fill a room before he had said a word.
At least, that was what they believed.
After his disappearance, theories multiplied faster than facts. Newspapers printed rumours. Television commentators argued over motives. People who had never met him spoke confidently about what he must have done and where he must have gone. Even psychics offered answers.
The truth was more complicated.
It always was.
The rest is in the book. Join the list and you will hear the moment it can be ordered.
