Buying on Time
    by Antanas Sileika

This book is a tribute to a real neighbourhood at a special point in time - working class north Edmonton on the cusp of the oil boom. McGillis has drawn partly on figures from his own late 60s, early 70s childhood, including a maverick substitute teacher with a predilection for Eastern philosophy, a nine-year-old champion of civil rights, a chain-smoking ten-year-old son of anti-war radicals and baseball immortal Roberto `Don't call me Bob' Clemente.

McGillis is a compulsive devourer of fiction in all its forms, and always knew one day he'd write novels of his own. Impetus for this story of a child in Edmonton came - paradoxically - from a honeymoon trip to India, where he stayed in villages much like those described by the Indian novelist R. K. Narayan and was struck by their similarities to the places where he grew up. With Narayan he shares a faith in the extraordinary qualities of ordinary lives, and a belief that `it is personality alone that is unchanging'.

`A Tourist's Guide to Glengarry may do for Glengarry what Mark Twain, Margaret Mitchell, or William Faulkner did for the South.'
    -- Barry Hammond, Legacy

`If J.D. Salinger or Mark Twain had lived in Edmonton, they might have written A Tourist's Guide to Glengarry. Prepare to slip into the mind of a nine-year-old. Prepare for a trip like Huckleberry Finn's, except here it is not a river that is travelled but a single day in the life of little Neil McDonald. Prepare for a story that is simple, deep, psychologically dead-on, minutely observed yet worldly - and very funny.'
    - Yann Martel, winner of the Booker Prize

`"Weird" and "neat" are neutral adjectives, but they betray something fundamental about Neil. Together they describe a sense of wonder, which often goes understated, and a certain ambivalence, the root of which is tolerance. With these two words, McGillis keeps himself and his readers on track, and in a genre which too often cedes artistic integrity to cliché, he refrains from playing the judgement card like a phony.'
     - Andrew Steinmetz, Books in Canada

`If the memory of childhood has lapsed, let this book be the antidote. A day in the life of a kid has never been so exquisitely, so magically, nor perhaps so comically, portrayed. Gazing through a child's ViewFinder, our sad world is renewed and made wondrous again, which, as Ian McGillis reminds us, is the true import of childhood.'
    - Trevor Ferguson, author of The Timekeeper

`Neil McDonald is the most eloquent nine-year-old you've ever heard. He's the narrator of Ian McGillis's captivating first novel, A Tourist's Guide to Glengarry and he's had quite a rough day -- encounters with drugs, booze, petty crime, teenage Italian girls, the threat of expulsion from school, enraged nuns, Black Sabbath, and puppy love are only a few of his worries. Set in 1971 Edmonton, a milieu that offers an uneasy blend of the cosmopolitan and the parochial, A Tourist's Guide to Glengarry offers a guileless account of young Neil's adventures, which involve a rapid-fire series of surprises, belly laughs, and kidney punches.'
    - amazon.ca

`Yann Martel loves A Tourist's Guide to Glengarry. In his cover blurb, the Booker-winning novelist compares it to the work of J. D. Salinger and Mark Twain. Martel's invocation of these particular giants is not just a generous response to a good book. It aptly reflects Ian McGillis's particular knack: piercing the armoured adult's heart with the green arrow of a child's.

`Following an especially challenging day in the Edmonton suburb of Glengarry, nine-year-old Neil McDonald is urged by an eccentric teacher to record, as a writing exercise, everything that has happened to him since he tumbled from bed that morning. He does, and his singular diary forms the body of this debut, a dispatch from a mind still capable of wonder, yet sprouting tiny shoots of wisdom.