Present Reckoning

by Hugh Garner

This story had its beginnings nearly fifteen years ago, but it was only yesterday that its climax made newspaper headlines. The Pentland was just another of the cheap hotels that crowd the square mile east of Queen and Yonge. Tom Neelton had come back to it because it was the closest he had ever come to a permanent address. From here he started his disastrous search for Carol, whose memory neither time or the women of England or Italy or Germany had been able to efface. At the Pentland too, he had met Margaret, as cynical and embittered as himself, and for a while she satisfied him. But nothing or no one, not even Carol when he found her, could make up for the years of which he considered fate had cheated him. This is really the portrait of Toronto. In telling the story of Tom and Carol, of the people they knew, the streets they lived on and the violence they wrought, Hugh Garner reveals the hidden life of a city. By the author of CABBAGETOWN.

153 pages, Mass Market Paperback

Published January 1, 1951

About the author

Hugh Garner was a Canadian novelist.

Born in England, Garner came to Canada in 1919 with his parents and was raised in Toronto. During the Great Depression, he rode the rails in both Canada and the United States and then joined the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. During World War II he served in the Canadian navy. Following the war, Garner concentrated on his writing. He published his first novel, Storm Below, in 1949. Garner's most famous novel, Cabbagetown, depicted life in the Toronto neighbourhood of Cabbagetown, then Canada's most famous slum, during the Depression.

Garner's background (poor, urban, Protestant) is rare for a Canadian writer of his time. It is nevertheless, the foundation for his writing. His theme is working-class Ontario; the realistic novel his preferred genre.

In 1963, Garner won the Governor General's Award for his collection of short stories entitled Hugh Garner's Best Stories. Garner struggled much of his life with alcoholism, and died in 1979 of alcohol-related illness. A housing cooperative in Cabbagetown is named in his memory.