Moody Food - Tapa dura

From critically acclaimed novelist Ray Robertson comes the rollicking Great Gatsby of the ’60s — a sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll–suffused modern tragedy.

For Bill Hansen, things couldn’t be better. He’s got a beautiful folk-singer girlfriend, a job at Toronto’s coolest bookstore and, most of all, he’s got Yorkville, which in 1966 is nothing short of paradise for a boy from Etobicoke.

And then Bill meets Thomas Graham, who with his white snakeskin cowboy boots, red sequined shirt and Southern drawl doesn’t quite fit the Yorkville hippie mold. Soon, the charismatic Thomas draws Bill into an obsessive quest to create what he calls “Interstellar North American Music,” a mixed-race, cross-generational musical hybrid fusing rock and roll, country and western, and rhythm and blues. Augmented by Bill’s girlfriend, Christine, and Slippery Bannister, a one-time Nashville session man and now an infamous drunk, The Duckhead Secret Society is born. The band is spotted by a record company scout and is soon launched on a whirlwind tour of bars, taverns and dives across America, finally landing on LA’s Sunset Strip.

In the haze of harder and harder drugs, it all starts to come undone. As Bill recounts the rise and fall of Thomas Graham and his musical vision, he simultaneously tells the story of frustrated idealism and the passing of an entire generation.

Ray Robertson is a novelist and literary journalist living in Toronto. His first novel, Home Movies, won the Alta Lynd Cooke Prize and his second novel, Heroes, received considerable acclaim. Ray is a regular book reviewer and columnist for the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail. He is also a frequent guest on TVO’s “Imprint” and CBC Radio’s “Talking Books.”