Some Great Thing

An Excerpt

His son was born in 1957 at the Misericordia Hospital in Winnipeg, before men had to start watching their wives give birth. Asked about it years later, Ben Grafton replied, "What's a man to do in a place like that, except grow all bug-eyed and wobbly and make a shining fool of himself?"

On that windless January night, Ben Grafton didn't enter the delivery room. He didn't consider it. He waited until Louise was "finished," poked his head in the door and shouted "atta way Lulu!" Wearing a blue woolen cap that stopped short of his huge brown ears, he followed two nurses who took the infant to the nursery. Ben Grafton was not invited. Nor was he self-conscious. He was a forty-three-year-old railroad porter who had coped with all sorts of nonsense in the past and had long stopped wondering what people thought of his being this or that. They turned to tell him he couldn't stay in the nursery. He said he wanted to look at his little man.

Want to read more?

Reviews

"In his hilarious debut novel, Some Great Thing, Lawrence Hill uses [a] comic trick to craft a story that is chilling in its reality, faithful to its time and which eventually turns the initial laughter hollow. He lures the reader with sheer naturalness of the hilarious script, while sneaking in telling stories about the sad state of race relations in this country."
The Globe and Mail

"This is an extremely readable first novel…the characters make the book so enjoyable. They dance off the page…"
The Ottawa Citizen

"Some Great Thing is a human comedy told with a sly, gentle hand, and more intelligently constructed than anyone could expect from a first novel…it deserves to be a bestseller."
The Winnipeg Free Press