The Life of Hope

First edition
Author	Paul Quarrington
Country	Canada
Language	English
Genre	Novel
Publisher	Doubleday Canada
Publication date	1985
Media type	Print (Hardback)
Pages	288 pp
Preceded by	Home Game
Followed by	King Leary

The Life of Hope is a novel by Paul Quarrington, published in 1985 by Doubleday Canada.^[1] It is part of an unofficial trilogy with Quarrington's later novels King Leary and Logan in Overtime;^[2] although none of the novels centre on the same protagonists, they all feature some background interrelationships of character and setting.^[2]

The novel's central character, essentially an authorial self-insertion, is a novelist named Paul who is suffering from writer's block after the publication of his baseball-themed novel Home Game.^[1] Attending a writer's retreat in the small Southern Ontario town of Hope, he learns about the town's history as a free love and nudist commune established by an expatriate American cult leader named Joseph Benton Hope,^[3] which reignites his creativity as he begins to write a fictionalized account of the town's establishment.^[1]

The novel was a shortlisted finalist for the Stephen Leacock Award in 1986.^[4]

References