All former major league baseball player Zep Baker needs to put his life back on track is to revive his marriage by convincing his wife to return to Tampa with their daughter. But his wife won’t fall for his pleading or his old tricks. He needs a new game plan. Enter Hope, a neuroscience researcher who he persuades to help him in this endeavour. The resulting life-experiment takes both characters to places they did not foresee and for which they are not prepared.

With his award-winning comic touch, Trevor Cole has written a novel of great compassion and depth, taking an innovative approach to the brain-versus-heart debate that has been the material for philosophers, poets, dramatists, and novelists for centuries.

Trevor Cole is an award-winning journalist and novelist. His previous books include Norman Bray in the Performance of His Life, a Maclean's bestseller, shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award and the Commonwealth Writer's Prize for Best First Book, Canada-Caribbean region, longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; The Fearsome Particles, also shortlisted for the GGLA and longlisted for the IMPAC; and Practical Jean, nominated for the Rogers' Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and winner of the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. He lives in Toronto.

Trevor Cole's profile page

• Commended, <i>49th Shelf</i> Books of the Year

“The book as a whole retains the feel of the best humour writing: it has the rhythms and beats of humour, but in service to a darker significance … Trevor Cole has crafted a novel of vivid emotional truths, grounded in characters so skilfully drawn they emerge as human beings captured on the page, rather than created. Zep and Hope are the unforgettable foundation for a novel that is gracious and graceful, powerful and clear-eyed, thoughtful, and full of life.”

The Globe and Mail

“Trevor Cole is the consummate craftsman, delicately placing each word in its right place, balancing each sentence to perfection, hitting each emotional note dead on. Hope Makes Love tackles the oldest and most unanswerable question: What is love? The answer: A riveting story, part funny, part sexy, occasionally tragic, and ultimately life-transforming.”

Angie Abdou, author of <i>The Bone Cage</i>

“Hope Makes Love is, on its surface, a deceptively simple story of the Post-Breakup-I-Want-Her-Back variety. A few pages in, though, and the reader will discover that it contains multitudes. Trevor Cole takes on a number of serious issues — sexual assault, domestic violence and post-traumatic stress disorder, to name a few — and handles them with delicacy, humour and real compassion.”

The Belle Jar

“Cole’s ability to make readers think is as important as his talent for making them laugh. It would be possible to take the plot of this novel and redo it without a single moment of levity. But so much would be lost. It’s the combination of comedy and tragedy – of science and emotion – that makes the book so rewarding.”

Quill and Quire

“Combining a clinical approach to love with the real thing — real passion, real tenderness — is a tricky thing, but Trevor Cole pulls it off magnificently. The characters in this dark, profound, contemporary novel learn the hard way that love is the only balm that can cure a damaged heart. What a moving, powerful work by a brilliant author.”

Joseph Kertes, author of <i>Gratitude</i> and <i>The Afterlife of Stars</i>