Mind the Gap

Winner of the 2020 Reader Views Award for best humor/satire of 2019, this is a crazy, funny novel about family life, illness, healing and the search for love.

Mind the Gap recounts the misadventures of an improbable hero, Richard Grey, who wears a gas mask in front of the TV set, while watching his favourite hockey team, the Montreal Canadiens. Given that he grows up pretty much in confinement, weird things happen around him ... or is it all in his mind?

In this quirky coming-of-age novel, readers meet a cast of colourful, off-the-wall characters, from Grandmother Grieve to Father Reginald and Mother Augusta to the elusive "girl next door", Chloé Trahan.

Kirkus Reviews calls Mind the Gap "a seriocomic dysfunctional-family saga and magical-realist coming-of-age tale that will put some readers in mind of John Irving's work—if Irving had a fondness for hockey. The well-drawn characterizations carry along a plotline that seems a bit too bumpy and meandering for its own good. Fortunately, the characters are sympathetic, vulnerable, and oddball enough to make the rocky journey worthwhile, and some of Tombs' details—especially in his portrait of a shady book publisher—have an impressive realism. An effective novel of family and society from a writer with a flair for the offbeat."