Wild GooseAgency

Gavin Phillips

Grace

In one sentence: A young man carries everything alone for fourteen years until the world names what he could never say himself — and the people who were quietly there for all of it turn out to have been enough.
Genre
High concept, realistic fiction
State
Compleate
Rights available
World English / Translation / Film & TV
Audience
New Adult, Adult.
Word count
97,000 approx
Timeline
September 1998 — January 2002
Setting
UNB Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada (with Alberta and Nova Scotia sequences)
Narrative Perspective
Matthew narrates in first person, present tense

Comparables

"A Little Life" (Yanagihara), "The Stone Angel" (Laurence), "The Catcher in the Rye" (Salinger)

Synopsis

“Grace” is a literary novel set at the University of New Brunswick between 1998 and 2002. It is narrated in first-person present tense by Matthew Callaghan, a twenty-year-old CS student from northern Alberta who carries a secret so deeply suppressed he does not know he is carrying it.

Over this four-part book — three and a half years of university, one summer of tree-planting in Nova Scotia, one summer of grief in Alberta — Matthew orbits Grace Harrison, the Presbyterian minister's daughter who runs a student ministry at UNB and who asks God things and waits for answers. He cannot stop approaching her. He cannot fully arrive.

Her father, Frank Harrison, bails Matthew out of jail at 2am without asking why. Neither of them ever mentions it again.
Amidst the central trauma, the sprawling ensemble cast adds a quiet, human texture to the margins—like the tentative, almost-romance between Jess and Ben, weaving his Indigenous heritage naturally into the broader world

Author's Note

Every book I wrote before Grace had a female protagonist. I've been asked why more than once and I've never had a satisfying answer. Curiosity about the female mind, maybe. Regardless, Matthew Callaghan is my first male protagonist — and if I'm being honest, writing him came more naturally than I expected.

Grace is also the first time I've taken the old adage seriously: write what you know. I grew up in Fredericton. UNB is woven into the fabric of this city — the university on the hill, the fall foliage coming in across the maples and birches, the evergreens filling in the soft spots. I've walked that campus in every season. It was time to put it on the page.

I've always loved the research process. The rabbit holes you fall into without meaning to, the hours that disappear, the things you learn that never make it into the book but quietly shape everything that does. AI has changed that process — research moves faster now, though accuracy still demands the same attention it always has. I don't mourn the hours saved. I use them elsewhere.

Matthew's specific wounds are not mine. But the things underneath them — the way damage gets filed away, the gap between how a person presents and what they're actually carrying — those I know something about. Every protagonist I've written circles back to the same territory eventually. Matthew is no different. He just took a different road getting there.

I was Matthew's age once, curious about faith and willing to sit with the questions. I'm a follower of Jesus today. Writing this book felt like opening a time capsule I'd forgotten I'd buried — thirty years sealed inside it, waiting.