Temporary Palaces - by Jeff Miller (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"A plainspoken, punk-rock hymn ... This is a book that will pick you up off the floor of a mosh pit and wrap you in its arms." --Sean Michaels

In the fevered summer of 2001, charismatic activist Rob and his collective set up a squat in an abandoned house. His bandmate and lover, Ben, watches anxiously as his own plans are threatened by Rob's choice of radical politics over music. Meanwhile, photographer Alex finds herself torn between documenting the chaos of the scene and saving the friendship that binds them together. When the police break up the squat, Rob vanishes, and the dream dies.

Ten years later, Alex and Ben find each other again--she's conquering Montreal's contemporary art world, he's running a thriving restaurant in Ottawa. But their success feels hollow. As they excavate their shared past, they must confront the ghost of Rob's disappearance and the trauma that pushed them apart.

Pulsing with the raw energy of basement punk shows and DIY creativity, late-night manifestos and first heartbreaks, Temporary Palaces is a blazing debut that captures a generation caught between idealism and survival, art and activism, the dreams that define us and the compromises that save us.

Review Quotes

"Temporary Palaces is a fierce and tender portrait of young people chasing their dreams. Years pass, lives change, the dreams get tattered and remade along the way--but Jeff Miller's fine writing testifies to the ties that remain. This is a lovely and memorable debut by a writer to watch." --Alix Ohlin, author of Inside and We Want What We Want

"Temporary Palaces is a haunting ode to youthful idealism and art-making that tracks its protagonists' grinding pivot to the career-building and long-term relationships of adulthood. Jeff Miller welcomes readers into anarchist flop houses, music venues, and restaurant kitchens with revealing detail, gentle humour, and an open heart." --Kevin Chong, author of The Double Life of Benson Yu

"A deeply intimate, vivid, and thoroughly engrossing account of youth culture, punk pathos, love, ambition, and the moral entanglements that come with it. Jeff Miller's characters are confronted with the unfathomable realization faced by every young person--that the belief system that once defined you will inevitably shift and change, just as the storefronts, tenements, and city skyline of your hometown will inevitably change. Everything is temporary." --Alex Edkins, METZ and Weird Nightmare

"A love letter to the ones who got away, and the ones who never let go, Temporary Palaces is punk enough to be tender about the way scenes form people and place. Jeff Miller has written a wise, elegiac novel about the interstices of subculture, and how memory and time comes for us all." --Michelle Min Sterling, New York Times bestselling author of Camp Zero

"In this self-assured debut, Jeff Miller paints a vivid picture of life in the dive bars, dish pits, art spaces, and punk houses at the dawn of the new millennium. Steeped in the subcultures of punk rock and indie sleaze, Temporary Palaces is full of details so authentic you'd think these fictional characters are real people. These are young anarchists, starving artists, and flawed idealists burnt out on trying to change--or even just survive--a system designed to keep them down. At its heart, though, is a story of romance and heartbreak, and all of the cuts and scrapes from youth that leave scars that last forever." --Adam Feibel, co-author of In Too Deep: When Canadian Punks Took Over the World

"Jeff Miller is a beautiful storyteller who masterfully weaves threads of the past into the delicate fabric of the present. The walls of punk houses long torn down come alive again in Temporary Palaces, an impassioned elegy to the reckless passion of youth and its lingering impact on wounds still healing in the present. The world that Miller has created here feels broken in and well worn, its backdrops a vividly realized collection of derelict living spaces, back roads, and side streets, and the unforeseeable futures waiting for hardened and delicate hearts. A beautifully told story about the formative power of people and places, even and especially those that are flawed and crumbling into the dirt below." --Niko Stratis, author of The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman

"Jeff Miller writes with intensity and grace about those pitched moments in our lives when everything is changing before we quite know it. Temporary Palaces is a gritty, moving debut about young people finding and losing themselves--in music, in politics, in love--and realizing that since, as the saying goes, the struggle never ends, the moments of connection, joy, and integrity along the way really matter." --Sam Lipsyte, New York Times bestselling author of The Ask and No One Left to Come Looking for You

"Jeff Miller's debut novel is like a plainspoken, punk-rock hymn, singing praise and gratitude to the lovers, fighters, artists, and burnouts whose bands, art projects, friendships, and political movements were torn to pieces--but endured somehow, all the same. This is a book that will pick you up off the floor of a mosh-pit and wrap you in its arms." --Sean Michaels, Giller Prize-winning author of Us Conductors and Do You Remember Being Born?

"A loving, lamenting ode to a scrappier era." --Literary Review of Canada

"An enthralling debut with a punk heart." --Largehearted Boy

"A memorable debut ... Miller's bittersweet novel burns with the warmth of lasting friendship." --Publishers Weekly