The Lonely End of the Rink: Confessions of a Reluctant Goalie

Winner of the Bill Duthie's Booksellers Award!

In addition to being a CBC host, an eminent indie-rock alumnus, and the award-winning author of the bestselling book Adventures in Solitude, Grant Lawrence has another claim to fame: as a toddler, he spent the majority of a plane ride from Toronto to Winnipeg on Bobby Orr's lap. Grant, his parents, Bobby Orr and the rest of the Canadian hockey team were on their way to Game Three of the famous Summit Series -- seven games played between Russia and Canada in 1972, during the height of the Cold War. It was at this point -- at the age of one -- that Grant's life-long entanglement with hockey began.

In this deeply personal, yet incredibly witty memoir about Grant's relationship with hockey, the narrative passes back and forth between tales of Grant's life and a fascinating history of hockey, complete with lively anecdotes about the many colourful characters of the NHL. Through Grant's early life, he struggled with the idea of hockey. He was an undersized child who wore thick glasses and knee-braces, and he understood, first-hand, what it was like to be in the attack zone of the hockey-obsessed jocks at his school. For Grant, bullying and the violent game of hockey seemed to go hand-in-hand. Yet he was also enamoured with the sport, and eventually learned that playing goalie on a hockey team isn’t all that different from playing in a band and that artistically-minded wimps find just as much joy in the game as their meathead counterparts.

In The Lonely End of the Rink, Grant Lawrence brings the allure of hockey into a zone where it can impress upon the nerds and geeks as well as the jocks. Grant is a highly original writer, and with this book, he tells a quintessentially Canadian story about the nation’s favourite sport.