The Necropolis (once marking the gates of the city's "Potters Field")

Hearing the author read at Toronto’s Word on the Street festival this year truly highlighted the humour of this novel.

(It’s hard to find funny novels, isn’t it?! Apparently the judges thought so too, and wanted to make sure this one got noticed.)

But even straight from the page, Samuel’s perspective is truly invigorating.

And I’d already had a tour of the Toronto Book Award titles in mind.

One bright, warm autumn day, I went out to capture the places on this novel’s pages.

Some destinations were already familiar to me, but others were relatively new to me.

For instance, I’d been to Riverdale Farm a few times (a destination which features more prominently in Alissa York’s nominated novel, Fauna), but had never done more than glance at the Necropolis across the way from it.

Mind you, Samuel doesn’t check it out mid-day. But my camera isn’t fancy. (Not fancy enough for night-time shots. Or for zooming, at least not when I’ve had a cup of espresso.)

So I added it to the daylight tour with plans to imagine a rising moon and spookiness.

To the right is my photograph of the entrance to the chapel at the Necropolis, and below is Samuel’s commentary on it.

“The steeples and old-fashioned windows and solid brick walls made it look like a castle. Or maybe the Wayne manor. I wandered around the compound until I came to a plague that read, Toronto Necropolis. Necropolis: I had come across the word in horror comics and on my way back I imagined that all the old Cabbagetown ghosts were roaming around the place and also complaining about how much the place had changed.”

If you check out this link, you’ll see more of the pictures that I took, inspired by The Amazing, Absorbing Boy: a taste of Toronto, for the clicking, here.

Happy travels! And congrats to Rabindranath Maharaj and the other nominees: Alissa York for Fauna, James King for Etienne’s Alphabet, Nicholas Ruddock for The Parabolist, and James Fitzgerald for What Disturbs Our Blood.