Jamie Trotter is growing up in Waterloo, Ontario in the 1960s and 1970s. Outwardly he leads an ideal life: he has loving parents, goes to church and school, and plays hockey. When he is ten years old, however, a joke that backfires starts him on an unexpected path to self-discovery. Gradually, his life becomes more complicated. At age seventeen, his first love becomes entangled with doubts about religion and rebellion against his parents, and he is pushed towards a potentially life-altering decision. By turns tragic and wildly funny, Driving Lessons is a Canadian coming-of-age novel in the rich tradition that runs from W. O. Mitchell to Miriam Toews.

Jamie Dopp is associate professor of Canadian literature at the University of Victoria, where he has taught a course in hockey and literature for a number of years. His poetry, fiction, reviews, and scholarly articles have appeared in many journals. He has published two collections of poetry and a novel and in 2009, he co-edited a collection of essays with Richard Harrison called Now is the Winter: Thinking about Hockey.

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