Charlie is different. He is obsessive-compulsive, is dependent on numbers, is a lover of strange, and is a refugee from a mental ward. When a beautiful number appears on his call display – the number of a woman he’d long assumed was dead – he lifts himself from the tangle of his mind to stalk the streets of Montreal in search of his lost love, his lost dreams, the boy he used to be, and the man he’d wanted to become. What he finds is more than a past that he had desperately tried to forget.

Universal Disorder is an extraordinary novel about the human psyche and the imperfect, disordered ways that we love each other.

Bernice Friesen is a writer and visual artist whose poetry and fiction have been published in numerous periodicals, such as Grain, CV2, Prairie Fire and the Capilano Review. Coteau published her poetry collection Sex, Death and Naked Men in 1998. The title story of her book, The Seasons are Horses, won the Vicky Metcalf Award for Best Young Adult Short Story in Canada. Bernice Friesen was born in Rosthern, Saskatchewan, and now divides her time between Saskatoon and Hornby Island in BC.

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"How does a child born into poverty and abuse gain an adulthood worth living? For young Charlie – mentally disordered, gifted, sustained by a hidden intellect – the path leads from hardscrabble prairie to 1990s Montreal Goth culture, finally to blossoming love and particle physics. Bernice Friesen’s captivating second novel is equal parts heart-stirring and mind-bending, perfectly balancing the intimate with the cosmic."

Jim Bartley

"With the same exacting precision Charlie uses to make his paper birds, Friesen has sensitively crafted a visceral, affecting narrative, folding in just the right amounts of compassion, elegance, horror, and wonder. The voices inside Universal Disorder will echo in your head long after turning the last page."

Ashley Little