Jones’ characters are romantic, tough, sensitive and sometimes crazy— struggling writers, artists, and musicians, painted against a background of cafés, apartments and night clubs in Toronto’s urban core. They wear Doc Martens boots, berets, and black leather jackets, the legitimate ’80s and ’90s heirs of Kerouac’s Beats. The People One Knows is, at the same time, a public and an intimate book, written with honesty about male sexuality, with irony and a commitment to a city that has rarely been brought to life in fiction. A lurid, beguiling Toronto sings and sighs in these linked stories that form a novel-like evocation of the late 1980s.