Takhini Books, Victoria, Canada
Takhini Books
Fiction and memoirs by Anton Baer
Out now
More about the books here.
Herbie Peel makes it big.
Student years fall away.
The Yukon in the 1960s.
RED SUN FALLING, 2026
One day you’re a student, strolling to lectures up on the leafy university hill, enjoying chance meetings with friends, talking politics and art over espresso and port until first light. Saturday mornings you wander the Farmer’s Market, exploring vegetarianism and other revolutionary urges. How far does one commit to the life of young Ché and keep it sincere, and how far does one commit to the absolutely sincere inner life kept blowing hot by books and films and music? How far does one commit to that private life after dinner and after dark, when the bedroom door closes? You’ll make radically original movies, one day, soon, soon, once you leave everything behind for Europe, the sacred Endstation of the artist as cultural wanderer; you’ll be a professor at Oxford, maybe, if you can just show up there. Life is about to open out in moody, heart-stopping views of Paris, Rome, Berlin...Six years later you’re back. The lecture halls on the university hill are shut to you; the leaves have fallen; you have a job in a windowless room to go to. In the rainy evenings and weekend afternoons you walk from a bookstore cinema to the Einstein café to a Greek diner where the roast turkey comes out of a can and the potatoes are mashed from powder. Out the steamed-up windows, musicians and welfare artists hurry past taxi ranks, step in and out of hotel bars, strip joints, laundromats. Your home is a rented room and a mattress on the floor. What happened?
A comic novel about culture crash.
T R A S H L A N D, 2017
On a blazing afternoon outside Guelph, on a flagstone patio shaded by an awning propped up in the best traditions of Jamaican sugar plantations, George Brossing, a wall-eyed hunchback, is getting whacked. Keeping an eye on his trembling hand inching towards his vodka glass, his radical partner Barbra pens poetry inspired by the rogue clover on the old tractor path to the creek – 'bloody is their shade'. The reeds along the creek, sticking out of mattresses of laundromat foam, barely stir in the dirty, superheated air. Looking out on his lost world, George, a former farmboy, drifts into delirium tremens. In that dire twilight settling over the upmarket farmhouse, Herbie Peel is born in the kitchen sink.Herbie’s fall from the mother potato is nothing compared to the shock of hitting the cold steel, which knocks a bit of the starch out of him. Dazed under the trickling tap, orphaned, bruised, and already despised, he is scooped up, dropped, and dragged out of the kitchen on a sticky heel. Half-conscious on the grass, washed over by waves of awakenings from the candlelit patio where well-connected guests from Toronto talk art and prize money, young Herbie soaks up big ambitions. Will he be the smartest Prince Edward Red ever, or just another pretentious phoney?After absorbing the last of the art talk, the fully awake one-eyed Herbie, hunchback, staggers upright and dashes off into the dark to make it big – and skids straight into the pages of an old book of Edwardian nursery tales left open on the dewy grass.‘What makes this novel so brave and so original is exactly what would make it so difficult to publish.’
— Judy Clain, Little, Brown
Coming in October 2026
Home and how to leave it.
Next:
The Yukon trilogy WAITING FOR HITLER ON THE ELEVEN O'CLOCK NEWS.
Book II, 'Streetcar to the Edge of Summer', will be the first book of the series pubished.
Theo Wolfe, German ex-soldier, lives quietly in Whitehorse until a visiting Jew from his home town, now in Poland, vanishes off the street. Weeks later, a young local fails to come home from a fishing trip.
Almost thirty years after the war, Harald Wolfe arrives in Wroclaw, formerly Breslau, to look for traces of his father's past.
Elke Wolfe and Yury Solski, the younger brother of the local man who never came home from his fishing trip, face their last summer at home.
Coming next year.
An ugly Australian ex-soldier in Israel falls in love by mistake.
A young Australian painter in London walks out one evening into Bristol Street.
Thirty years later he returns from poverty in Perth to find a woman who has forgotten him.
The Swiss family Schultz run an air cargo business in northern Mexico. Johnny, black sheep of the family, steals his father's girlfriend, and the desert comes up to whack him.
Anton Baer is from the Yukon. He left Canada for Mexico at 16 and later lived and worked in Yugoslavia, Germany, Spain, the UK, and Czechoslovakia.
Cover photograph of Elm Street by Susan Lind Gleason.
First review of RED SUN FALLING, at Goodreads.
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