November's Radio, Steve Noyes' second novel, tells the story of recently separated Wendy and Gary. Wendy takes off to China, where she falls in with two performance artists. The three navigate questions of art, cultural difference, mental health and what it means to be free. Gary remains in Victoria, BC, stuck in a cubicle at the Ministry of Wellness. He's given the task of reviewing the research of an expensive anti-anxiety medication in order to make a recommendation whether the government should cover its cost. Nobody knows that he is on this medication himself. He navigates politics of public servitude, mediocrity and mental health. November's Radio's layers draw subtle parallels between China and Canada: both have political minefields of bureaucracy; both have outliers that do not know where they fit in. Noyes spins both yarns with keen wit and poetic language, concluding that sometimes all we can do is stick that one person who sees our neuroses and holds on anyway.

Steve Noyes has published six books of poetry and fiction. In Ghost Country, he also explored the distances to China; in Morbidity and Ornament, he mixed his formal, tight poems in Chinese with his manic narrative English poems. It is Just That Your House is So Far Away is his first novel. Raised in Winnipeg, Noyes is a graduate of UBC’s MFA Writing program and Carleton’s journalism school, and has published over 100 poems, stories and reviews in such magazines and newspapers as The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, Event, The Globe and Mail, Queen’s Quarterly, and the Vancouver Sun. He has worked as Foreign Expert, policy analyst, parking-lot attendant, disabilities advocate, sessional lecturer, correspondence writer, plywood mill labourer, and editor. Over the past decade, Noyes has has travelled extensively across China, and worked and studied in Beijing, Shanghai, Taibei, Qingdao, and a little town north of Beijing. He is married to the poet Catherine Greenwood, and currently makes his home in Victoria where he works for the Ministry of Health.

Steve Noyes' profile page