A Canadian Bankclerk

Evan Nelson is twenty-one and leaving Hometon, and saying goodbye to everything he knows feels like tearing something loose inside him. The train carries him toward Mt. Alban, toward a career in banking, toward whatever a man is supposed to become. But the first weeks behind the oak desk are humbling: procedures that tangle his fingers, colleagues who notice every blunder, and the particular loneliness of eating dinner alone in a boarding house while the silence of homesickness presses in. Through the comic mishaps of his apprenticeship and the slow, careful unfolding of his feelings for a girl named Frankie, Evan discovers that the adult world demands sacrifices he never anticipated. Jack Preston captures the exact texture of young adulthood in this forgotten Canadian novel: the longing for who you were, the awkward fumbling toward who you might become, and the quiet heroism of simply staying the course when everything feels uncertain. For readers who cherish the pleasure of watching a character find their footing, this is a tender, funny portrait of beginnings.