House of Anansi, April 21, 2026. $26.99
Hard as it might be to get your head around, Temporary Palaces – set largely in 2001 – is a historical novel. It tells of a time when the zine, not the blog or the Substack, was the dominant form of DIY self-expression, and advertising your band by stapling homemade posters to phone poles was cutting-edge marketing. And many Canadian cities still had a supply of run-down, inner-city houses that a group of punks or anarchists could rent and live in communally for cheap – at least until the gentrifiers showed up.
As the story opens in Ottawa in the summer of 2001, punk rock singer Ben and budding visual artist Alex seem to be fumbling toward a relationship, although she plans on heading to Vancouver in the fall to do an MFA.
But the pole star of the story, at least in these early days, is Rob. I suspect we’ve all known a Rob: attractive, charismatic, seemingly a natural leader, but more than capable of creating personal chaos wherever he goes. “He had a gift for feeling what people wanted— community, attention, sex, something to believe in— and folding it into his mission to change the world.” His decision to quit Ben’s band ruins their chances of touring, but he is chasing a bigger dream: converting an abandoned mansion into a radical anarchist squat—one of the temporary palaces of the title. It’s the sort of political gesture that’s attractive at a certain age not despite, but precisely because it’s impossible. Predictably, the police shut it down fast, and Rob gets arrested. Then he slowly begins to unravel.
By sucking in all the desire and the attention, Rob is a big part of what keeps Ben and Alex apart, although their own nervousness and misreading of cues also contribute.
It’s only ten years later, when they are both in their early thirties, that the two connect. They’ve learned about themselves and they have some perspective on their younger selves—and on Rob. For the two of them, at least, life has worked out: “You’re still making art,” Ben says to Alex. “I’m still singing.”
First time novelist Jeff Miller combines an unsentimental eye with a good heart. It would, for example, be easy to parody these kids’ political beliefs, but Miller presents them straight. His generosity to his characters makes it easy to forgive those spots where his prose is a little too on the nose or he tells us something instead of showing. He’s also adept at conveying the atmosphere of this world, the grimy run-down squats, the sweaty punk bars, even the faded band t-shirts the characters wear. But you don’t have to have been part of this scene to enjoy Temporary Palaces – anyone with even a passing connection to young boho life in any era will understand it.
Although Miller makes it clear in conversation that Temporary Palaces is not autobiographical, its world was definitely his at one point. Born in 1979, Miller was an avid fan of punk rock (and if ever a book demanded a Spotify playlist, Temporary Palaces is it). That music was the gateway drug that led him to zine culture.
For Miller, the 1990s were the golden age of the zine. Earlier iterations had mostly been about sharing an enthusiasm—for music, comics or the like—but, he says, “by the 90s, it was a little more personal. Really interesting, slice-of-life stuff that nowadays we’d call creative nonfiction.” He started his own zine, Ghost Pine, in 1996. “I still make it,” he says. “I made one last summer.” Invisible Press put out an anthology of pieces from it, Ghost Pine: All Stories True, in 2010.
Temporary Palaces, Miller says, began with an image. “I had this idea for a scene where someone is moving out of an apartment, and they find a bunch of old rolls of film at the back of their freezer.” The scene never made it into the book, but it gave him the character of Ben, and then, as he thought about who shot the film, Alex. From there, it was a long process of successive drafts, and a four-year spell doing a low-residency MFA through the creative writing program at the University of British Columbia while living in Montreal.
When Miller felt he was ready, he did pretty much what you’d expect of any self-respecting, punk rock-loving,
zine-creating millennial: he sent it unsolicited to House of Anansi. “Yeah, they have an open process for stuff on their website, a place you can submit, and I just sent it in.”
Editor Douglas Richmond at Anansi picks up the story. “I was lucky enough to be looking through the slush pile one day and read the description and was immediately intrigued.” It was the voice and the quality of the writing that got him, especially for a first-time novelist, but it didn’t hurt that his earlier days more or less paralleled Miller’s. “I am of roughly the same age as Jeff and came from a very similar background. I grew up in Burlington, part of a very thriving punk rock community scene, playing in bands and very into social justice activism. So, a lot of what Jeff was writing about instantly spoke to me.”
Mills isn’t certain what comes next. “There’s a lot of options, which feels great … but it’s a funny leap from finished or almost finished writing, to going back to something that’s still very much primordial. It’s exciting and it’s daunting but, you know, writing is the funnest thing to do, so any opportunity to keep hacking away at stuff, I’m thrilled.”