The Day Aunt Gina Came To Town

"John Schoneboom is a wonderful storyteller and a unique voice in contemporary fiction. With the same surreal, madcap, and wildly inventive style that made his earlier novel Fontoon such a joy, he now tells the story of an ordinary family who may or may not be involved in global politics, alien telepathy, the sex-life of Edward VII, and the singing career of Johnny Mathis, and whose eponymous aunt is as elusive as the Higgs boson. Leave logic behind and prepare to be enthralled by this multifaceted comedy of everyday life in a universe that could almost be our own, but not quite."

-- Andrew Crumey, Beethoven's Assassins inter alia

"I loved The Day Aunt Gina Came To Town. This book takes surrealist concepts of the construction of reality as the starting point for an absurd, digressive portrait of suburban family life, with a heavy emphasis on the absurd. It's both very silly and deeply serious.

A description of the plot would make it sound like it could be unbearably wacky, but the execution is what makes it. There's a harshness, a lack of sentimentality, that helps prevent a descent into pure zaniness, and ensures the characters aren't given any unwarranted leniency. It doesn't flinch."

-- H. Anthony Hildebrand, Writer and Noisemaker

"There is an underlying warmth here, despite [both the unflinching bleakness and the humor]. Perhaps it's because the book acknowledges that we're all flawed and fumbling our way through life and constructing our own stories, projecting our own realities, as a means of constructing ourselves. At times I found the prose unexpectedly affecting amidst the deadpan strangeness."

-- H. Anthony Hildebrand, Writer and Noisemaker