Linebound

Linebound is an old Eastern Townships word referring to those who have been banned for legal reasons from crossing the nearby border between Quebec and Vermont. Peter Turner’s novel is the story of a country lawyer navigating the borderlands of life. Charlie England, an Anglo born in 1975 on his family’s 200-year old Eastern Townships farm rides both sides of the line between English and French culture, the vividness of life and bleakness of death, and the profound changes from a centuries old way of life to a world with no apparent regard for what it has lost. With humour, humility, and honesty, we trace Charlie’s path between harsh and hilarious early lessons in farm and country life to football scholarships and heartache at Laval. Punctuated by absurd but uniquely human legal cases threaded through a married life that rolls through valleys of passion then isolation, Linebound is the story of a man caught in a moment of social, cultural, and personal upheaval and the messy space of difference and tolerance that is vital to making it all work.