A bookseller's love affair, start to finish, against the backdrop of a city in protest. It's 1971. Hal Sachs runs a used bookstore. Business isn't so great, and the store is in a part of Toronto that's about to be paved over with a behemoth expressway. And then Hal meets Lily Klein, an activist schoolteacher who'll do just about anything to stop the highway. It's love at first sight. Until it isn't. And then Hal vanishes.

A half-century later, Hal's nephew, Aitch, waits for his baby to be born as he tries to piece together facts and fictions about Hal's disappearance.

Splitsville is a diamond-cut love letter to a city whose defining moment was to say 'no way' to a highway, and a look at the obsessions that carry down through a family.

Howard Akler was born in Toronto in 1969. He is the author of two books with Coach House: The City Man, which was nominated for the Amazon First Novel Award, the City of Toronto Book Award, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and Men of Action which won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award, and was featured as a part of the 2015 New York Times Gift Guide. He lives in Toronto.

Howard Akler's profile page