Solitude and the Cow in Toronto: Being a Full Honest Account of Obsession, Spectacle, Surprising Utility Milk at 5am: 2

The morning after Jake Fidellius is dumped, he comes home to find a cow standing in the middle of his Distillery District apartment in Toronto, Canada.There is no explanation. There is no note. There is only Bertha: placid, enormous, inexplicable, and producing the finest milk Jake has ever tasted. A British expat philosopher adrift in Toronto, Jake does the only thing he can think to do. He makes a cappuccino, photographs the cow, and posts it online.What follows is a slow unravelling and a slower healing. As Bertha turns Jake into an accidental internet sensation, a government surveillance unit hidden inside a fish and chip truck that sells no fish and chips begins quietly recording his every move. Meanwhile a Québécois stranger named Oliver walks into a brewery, and into Jake's carefully guarded solitude, and looks at him the way a person looks at another person rather than the way a phone looks at a spectacle.The Unknown Life of Jake Fidellius is a tender, strange, and quietly philosophical novel about authenticity in an age that rewards performance. It asks what we are really chasing when we reach for the warm jolt of being seen, and whether solitude and loneliness were ever the same thing at all.For readers of literary fiction that is gentle, absurd, and unafraid to sit in the quiet. A love story, of sorts. A meditation on being seen. And yes, there is a cow.