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After a thirty-year exile in Toronto, self-described ?mid-listing? Newfoundland author James Nightingale leaves behind a failed marriage to a successful classical musician, who has taken up with an avant-garde composer, and a middling, if critically successful, career to return temporarily to St. John?s to receive an honourary degree from his alma mater. Braving the obstacles of artistic and domestic uncertainty and neglected family obligations--not to mention a book-signing and a launch that go risibly wrong--he meets old friends whose own artistic lives have borne little fruit, and contends with a talented daughter who, in defiance of her mother, has abandoned her classica-music roots in favour of performing ?deconstructed? traditional Newfoundland songs, a father suffering from dementia but with a sharp memory of disappointment, and an untrustworthy former publisher who is re-releasing his seminal first novel.