In SkyRoom, novelist Larry Gaudet tells the story of Shobac, a seaside village recognized internationally as the masterwork of famed Canadian architect Brian Mackay-Lyons. In partnership with his wife Marilyn Mackay-Lyons and their family, he has built a unique community over the granite ruins of a historic settlement on the fogbound coast of Nova Scotia. Among the structures at Shobac are homes, barns, studios, cottages, fishing shacks, a boathouse, even a schoolhouse, all designed in Mackay-Lyons's compelling architectural language that fuses con-temporary Modernism with Nova Scotia building traditions.SkyRoom is written in a new genre that Gaudet calls magic architectural realism, blending fact with historical fiction in presenting the lives of early inhabitants and visitors to the Shobac area, in-cluding Samuel de Champlain, a Mi'kmaq mystic, an Acadian carpenter, and other lively charac-ters whose ghostly presence swirl in the untold myths of this coastal Shangri-La. More provoca-tively, Gaudet orchestrates imaginary conversations between Mackay-Lyons and legendary figures in architecture--Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies Van Der Rohe, Louis Kahn, Charles Moore, and oth-ers--all toward providing a novel perspective on what goes into building communities and homes worth living in.