Adam Macallister’s sportswriting career is about to end before it begins, but he’s got one last shot: a Sports Illustrated profile about hockey’s most notorious goon, the reclusive Terry Punchout-who also happens to be Adam’s estranged father. Adam returns to Pennington, Nova Scotia, where Terry now lives in the local rink and drives the Zamboni.

Going home means drinking with old friends, revisiting neglected relationships, and dealing with lingering feelings about his father and dead mother-and discovering that his friends and family are kinder and more complicated than he ever gave them credit for. 

Searching for Terry Punchouti s a charming and funny tale of hockey, small-town Maritime life, and how, despite our best efforts, we just can’t avoid turning into our parents.

IN A NUTSHELL
A novel about hockey, coming back to the small town you grew up in and hoped never to see again, discovering that your father isn’t the person your memory told you he was, that you aren’t the person you hoped you’d be and that home is a place you can never really leave behind but which doesn’t stand still while you’re away.

The storytelling seems straightforward, the writing is accessible, the dialogue is realistic, but behind the simplicity is an artfully crafted structure that builds a deeply emotional picture of a man who has become a little lost and who, by coming home, finally starts to reassess himself, his friends and his father.

I read ‘Searching For Terry Punchout’ because it’s on the 2026 Canada Reads shortlist. Given that the novel is about Adam Macallister, a down-on-his-luck (recently laid off) sportswriter, trying to make money by writing a bio-piece on his estranged hockey-playing father, a retired NFL player famous for his record-setting time in the penalty box, I’d expected to find myself reading a hockey-intensive story with lots of sports-speak and team spirt. It wasn’t that kind of book at all. Insofar as it was about hockey, it was focused on what hockey means to people who live their whole lives in small Canadian towns and what it means to those who use it to get out of small Canadian towns. The energy of the story comes from sharing Adam Macallister’s experience of coming home to the small town he grew up in and had hoped never to return to, and his interviews with the estranged father he’d spent years refusing to talk to 

The story is told from Adam Macallister’s point of view, giving the reader direct access to his ‘woe is me/life is hard’ interior monologue. I admired the way Tyler Hellard challenged this monologue, firstly by giving the reader direct access to Terry Macallister’s version of events via a series of unscripted, straight-to-his-son ‘s-tape-recorder, autobiographical monologues; and secondly through the conversations that Adam has with the friends he left behind and whose memories, values and expectations often differ from his. 

I was surprised to find that I liked Terry Macalister more than his son. The more I knew about Adam Macalister, the less I liked him. He struck me as a whiney, insecure, do-you-know-how-bad-I’ve-had-it? man, who hadn’t grown up yet and didn’t really want to. I think it was a sign of the quality of the writing that Adam annoyed me so much, and yet I wanted to keep reading. His father, on the other hand, was more thoughtful, more self-aware and more at peace with himself than his well-educated but deeply insecure son.

It’s easy to underestimate a novel like this because the writing doesn’t feel literary. There’s no purple prose, no epiphanic moments capped with perfectly formed epigrams; there’s just the kind of conversations that you’d hear in any bar where men who’ve known each other forever gather to get drunk and talk about sports, life and women. There’s also a beautifully low-key humour that prevents the book from becoming a pity party. I’d half-expected to find the book littered with sports clichés, but Tyler Hellard’s only use of clichés was in a piece of humour that made me like Adam Macalister at least a little. Here’s Adam’s interior pep talk to himself when he’s trying to get motivated to continue with the emotionally awkward interviews with his father:

“Maybe this will work out for me, after all. I’ve read a thousand athlete profiles and a lot of players like to talk about how they bet on themselves. It’s a stupid cliché because stupid clichés are the first language of all athletes, but I’ve never actually tried betting on myself to do something difficult, and now that I am—admittedly, more out of necessity than anything else—I’m suddenly surging with something that feels dangerously close to self-confidence. It’s intoxicating. I want to stay focused, step up, dig deep, give it a hundred and ten percent, play the game the right way, and do what it takes to win.”

I thought ‘Searching For Terry Punchout’ was a fine description of a not-as-grown-up-as-he-ought-to-be man being forced to reassess what he knows about his father, the people he grew up with and ultimately, himself. I liked that what finally sets Adam on a better path is an act of rage-fueled violence of the kind his father was famous for but seldom committed. 

I’ve seen this novel described as charming and uplifting. I didn’t find it to be either of those things. Perhaps that’s because I’m not Canadian, and so this doesn’t hit any of my nostalgia buttons. Most likely, it’s because I don’t find descriptions of drunken conversations or self-pitying introspection charming or uplifting, but that says more about me than the novel. For me, what makes this novel work is that it is insightful, truthful and, eventually, compassionate. 

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