Ray Robertson has written six novels. His first novel, Home Movies, won the Alta Lynd Cooke Prize and his second novel, Heroes, received considerable acclaim. Ray is a regular reviewer and columnist for the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail. He is also a frequent guest on CBC Radio’s “Talking Books,”; CBC Newsworld’s Hot Type, and TVO’s Imprint. His third novel Moody Food was published by Doubleday Canada and the Santa Fe Writers Project in the US. Gently Down the Stream, was selected a Best Book of 2005 by Globe and Mail.

What Happened Later tells the story of what happened after the fame generated by On the Road planted the seeds of Kerouac’s tragic demise. Poetic, poignant and clever, it is a unique and engaging story of two lives that were forever changed by one book.

More information can be found about Ray on his website:
www.rayrobertson.com

 

Published:

What Happened Later
(Thomas Allen Publishers, Fall 2007, VLB Editeur)

Quotes:

“Robertson, in imagistic prose, moves adroitly between his own fictionalized youth and the story of the steadily weakening Kerouac. …what we have in What Happened Later is an ambitious, dramatic, and creative memoir..”
     - Quill & Quire

“Something's happened to Ray Robertson. And that something is Jack Kerouac. … What Happened Later, a ripping riff on Kerouac and what he means to a fictional character named Ray Robertson, is wildly effective. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of On The Road. We'll doubtless be seeing tributes galore, but I can't think of a better one than this.”
     - NOW Magazine

“…in What Happened Later, Ray Robertson has figured out a way to do it. Robertson's prose is effortless. His chapters on Kerouac, comprising half the book, are so vivid that one easily imagines the sights, sounds and smells. This is...a moving, insightful psychological portrait of a man who, for millions of readers, personified the freedom of the Beat Generation and the spirit of life on the road. Best of all, the congenital empty ache in the heart that makes writers writers is well captured in this marvellously schizophrenic novel, which, like all good novels, lingers in the mind long after it's been put down.”
     - The Globe and Mail

“[Full of] rudely confident, eerily virtuosic prose. If Robertson, in the voice of his sombre second character, was wishing that he, too, could attain mastery 'of my craft, of the form, of my mind,' then the accomplishment so obvious here is all the reassurance he, or anyone else, should ever need.”
     - Toronto Star

“Two wonderful characters emerge from What Happened Later. The first is Jack Kerouac, fully-blown and reeling drunkenly through the cosmos. The second is Ray Robertson himself –compassionate, wise, and very, very funny.”
     - Paul Quarrington, author of Galveston and Whale Music

“In a prose honed to a beautiful, seeming casualness, Ray Robertson sets off on his own road with Jack Kerouac to see if he too, like Jack, can strike four seconds of lightning in the cloudless skies, if he too can make a little noise in the big silence. He does, this is it, this is lightning.”
     - Barry Callaghan, author of Between Trains and Barrelhouse Kings

“Robertson’s knack for creating interesting characters is matched by his ear for language. [H]e has given readers a funny, recognizable, contemporary portrait of disaffected manhood. With this compulsively readable, intelligent, witty and sad novel, Robertson deserves to achieve mainstream fame..”
     - Books in Canada

“Robertson’s art is as character-driven as Mordecai Richler’s, and he is becoming an equally brilliant observer and writer on human weakness who wants us all to behave better and doesn’t care who he angers along the way.”
     - Globe and Mail

World Rights Available Ex:
Canada:	English Canada: Thomas Allen Publishers – Fall 2007
Canada:	French Canada: VLB Editeur
	Manuscript available