When English Professor Marta Spëk is offered a film consultant's contract, she's fighting a bad case of year-end doldrums. She signs on, imagining that exotic hands-on work at the sandy location shoot for a made-in-Canada biopic will open doors of opportunity and spark her creativity - or at the very least supply interesting material for her family's annual Labour Day gathering. Meanwhile, her soon-to-be boss, the handsome cynic Jake Nugent, who's well experienced with shoot dynamics in remote sites, hopes only to stamp out inevitable problems before they swallow the budget and cost him a job. Script changes (massive), on-set mishaps (minor), and after-hours misadventures (many) guarantee that Marta and Jake won't easily forget this week in the Okanagan Valley. A wry look at the shoestring end of a billion-dollar industry and the occasional but profound foolishness of the human heart, This Location of Unknown Possibilities makes a case for black comedy being the best lens for viewing contemporary life.

Brett Josef Grubisic's first novel, The Age of Cities, was a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Prize. He's the author of Understanding Beryl Bainbridge and co-editor of National Plots: Historical Fiction and Changing Ideas of Canada. He teaches at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

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"A punchy, witty look at the chemical combustion that can occur when the world of the academy intersects with the world of showbiz, this novel's satire sparkles in a way that is surprising, funny, and sharp. Grubisic's prose shines." --Suzette Mayr, author of Monoceros and Venous Hum"This is a knife-edged satire that will keep you laughing all the way to the end." --Tamas Dobozy, author of Last Notes and Siege 13

"As the film, the narrative, and the characters spiral further out of control, the book gets darker, stranger, and funnier. By the time the film has wrapped, it has morphed into something utterly different, and the novel's own narrative has mutated, twisted, and slipped its bonds. When the book goes off the rails it is shattering and glorious--just as shattering and glorious as the lives we pretend we're authors of." --Natalie Zina Walchots, Quill & Quire March 2014

"A fascinating glimpse behind the scenes of a major motion picture, this is an absorbing, thought-provoking, and sharply witty novel." --Stephanie Turza, Booklist, April 2014

"His book is way beyond the merely comic; it's a densely ribald and culturally astute treatise, and it's fuelled by its own manic combustion engine." -- M.A.C. Farrant, Vancouver Sun, April 2014