Ghosted

Is ghostwriting suicide notes really the best way to pay off your debt to a drug dealer? And can someone who’s barely winning the battle with his own demons really afford to take on those of complete strangers? Such questions haunt Mason, the protagonist of acclaimed author Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall’s highly anticipated debut novel, Ghosted (Random House). Bishop-Stall will create and stage a dramatic scene based on the events of his book. Marc Glassman, Executive Director of This Is Not A Reading Series (TINARS) will host the evening. – A TINARS event presented by Random House Canada, NOW Magazine, Torontoist.com and Take Five On CIUT.

Ghosted Mason, a struggling writer, comes in from the cold after five years of drifting. His childhood friend, Chaz, a small-time gangster, loans him an apartment and finds him a job selling hotdogs. But instead of getting his act together, Mason drinks too much, does too many drugs and loses too much money at poker, digging himself even more deeply in debt to Chaz, who also happens to be his drug dealer. Talk about a vicious circle.

Then Mason has a bright idea. He'll find the cash to pay Chaz back by becoming a ghostwriter of suicide notes, a fitting use of his talents. The trouble is that Mason is hard-wired to rescue people, and no one needs rescuing more than the suicidal. Except maybe the woman he is falling in love with — Willy, a wheelchair-bound, heroin-smoking beauty.

What happens when someone already wrestling with his own demons immerses himself in the tragedies of other people's lives? In this case, a lot: a hotdog cart is totalled, a convict sprung, a funeral faked, a head scalped, a horse stolen. Terrible secrets are brought to the light and suicide morphs into murder. Then, just when it looks like Mason is finally going down, he faces the biggest test of all. He'll either become the death-defying hero of his own dreams or lose everything and everybody he's ever loved.

“Ghosted is not for the faint of heart—in places it’s an unflinching exploration of depravity. But it is, above all, an often funny, always optimistic parable of victory over demons of despair, the ghosts of our failed selves.” — Linden MacIntyre, Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning author of The Bishop’s Man

“Bukowski craggy and Hornby sweet, Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall’s Ghosted is a smart book about smart guys who can’t stop from acting dumb. The real pleasure, though, is in the lines: funny sad, funny strange, and funny zing! A hell of a first novel.” — Andrew Pyper, author of The Killing Circle

Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall's first book was an account of the year he spent in deep cover, living with the homeless in Toronto's infamous Tent City. Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown was nominated for the 2005 Pearson Writers' Trust of Canada Non-Fiction Prize, the Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize, the Trillium Award and the City of Toronto Book Award. The following year, he was awarded the Knowlton Nash Journalism Fellowship at Massey College and also played the role of Jason - a bad-mannered, well-dressed journalist - on CBC-TV's The Newsroom. He currently teaches writing at the University of Toronto's School of Continuing Studies. Ghosted is his first novel.

Media contacts:

Bishop-Stall: Scott Sellers, ssellers@randomhouse.com, (416)957-1564

TINARS: Chris Reed, coordinator@tinars.ca, (416) 598-1447