Nonimportantech: A novel about family, belonging, and the people we choose

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I never intended to write a story this large.

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What began as a few scattered ideas gradually grew into a novel about family, friendship, immigration, belonging, and the strange ways people become important to one another.

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Although every character, company, project, and event in Nonimportantech is fictional, many of the small fragments inside the story come from real life.

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Over the years, while running ACCO Photo in Montreal's Saint-Henri neighborhood, I have met thousands of people. Customers come in to print photographs, scan family albums, prepare immigration documents, restore old memories, or simply chat for a few minutes.

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Some experiences in the novel were inspired by things I have personally lived through: a misplaced lunch box, parents visiting from overseas and ending up in a hospital, insurance disputes, academic complications, and even missing an exam and temporarily losing the right to continue university studies.

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Of course, not everything comes from reality.

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The idea of packaging winter and exporting cold to tropical regions and the Southern Hemisphere is something I imagined many years ago. It was one of those strange thoughts that stayed in the back of my mind until it finally found a home inside this story.

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Nonimportantech is not a novel about superheroes, billionaires, or chosen ones.

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It is a story about ordinary people trying to build lives, relationships, communities, and families while navigating a world that rarely follows anyone's plans.

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Many of the places in the book do not exist.

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Yet if you spend enough time walking through Saint-Henri, sitting in a neighborhood café, waiting at a bus stop, visiting a university campus, or talking with the people who pass through a small local shop, you may recognize pieces of them.

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And perhaps that is the point.

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Sometimes fiction is simply reality rearranged into a different shape.