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In 1975 John Caine and his nineteen year old son Ricky bury a woman near a clump of trees in an open field on the rural outskirts of London, Ontario. In 1984, seventeen year old Bethany Caine is haunted by the disappearance of her mother nine years previous. Her father and brother insist Thelma Caine abandoned them one night, evidenced by her brief goodbye note. Having already escaped the house dominated by her brutish father, to live with her girlfriend and lover Angela, Bethany presses much older brother Ricky to reveal what actually happened to their mother.

Structured along alternating timelines, with chapters exploring the Caine family in the 1970s interspersed with chapters set around the Victoria Day long weekend in 1984, the novel unfolds a story of violence and incest as those who truly love and support Bethany attempt to uncover the mystery of Thelma Caine’s disappearance.

Available from DarkWinter Press, Fall, 2026.

Fair is available through indigo.ca, amazon.ca or alllitup.ca. Readers in the United States can also order through amazon.com.

Reader reviews are always welcome, whether you post them on retailers’ websites or on goodreads.com.

About Fair

In this spare, poetic novel, a young homeless man finds solace in friendship, falls prey to the machinations of a malevolent gang of thugs, and ultimately is swallowed up by the inevitability of consequences on the dangerous and deceptively sunny streets of L.A.

Eyan (pronounced Ian), homeless and all but invisible, drifts through the sundrenched streets, parks and boardwalks of Los Angeles, sometimes avoiding, sometimes seeking the shadows. A chance encounter with his childhood friend, Marc, leads Eyan to meet ‘the professor’, an erudite and tragic figure who takes Eyan under his wing, reading to him from Milton’s Paradise Lost in the lustrated light of the city at night. But these friendships also drag Eyan into the City of Angels’ Skid Row, the largest homeless community in North America. There, the sinister Paul and his gang of black-garbed ‘eyeless boys’ have established a reign of daily terror, committing murder after murder which the police are incapable of stopping. As tensions on the streets increase, the professor continues to read from Milton’s great epic, and Eyan begins to wonder: if even the angels can find themselves at war, what hope, and what kind of home, exists for him?

Fair offers a lyrical and reflective glimpse into a vulnerable young man’s struggle to survive in an indifferent, violent world.

To hear Ed discuss Fair listen to him being interviewed on Words with Writers Podcast.