By 
TORONTO, ON — Multi-platinum recording artist Corey Hart, best known for hits including “Sunglasses at Night,” has spent four decades in the music spotlight. Now, he is stepping into the literary world with his highly anticipated debut novel, The Eternal Return, published by RE: BOOKS and available from Amazon and Indigo on November 20, 2026.
In The Eternal Return, Hart takes readers behind the scenes of the New York art world, pulling back the curtain on a temperamental and judgmental industry with the power to crush a soul if you let it.
The novel follows Peter Kafka, a Manhattan gallery curator who has spent years championing other people’s work while quietly concealing his own ambition to paint. At its core, the book asks a question larger than any single art form, one that belongs to every artist who has ever made something and sent it into the world: Are you prepared for the answer? No one is.
A story of exposure and consequence
Hart uses fiction to explore something broader than any single discipline: what it costs to make art, expose it to judgment, and discover that the world may not see what you see.
In The Eternal Return, Peter spends a decade summoning the courage to unveil 20 deeply personal paintings, created in the years since the death of the mother who shaped his inner world and artistic spirit. Surely, he believes, the world will recognise their meaning. Instead, the moment he expects to define his future begins to unravel it.
Over three days in Manhattan, Peter is pulled through rejection, obsession, unexpected encounters, and the unresolved claims of his past. The novel examines the raw vulnerability of an artist whose passion is finally exposed—and what remains in the aftermath.
A new creative challenge
Writing his first novel presented Hart with a new kind of creative risk. After decades within the compressed form of songwriting and having sold more than 16 million records worldwide, earned nine consecutive U.S. Billboard Top 40 hits, and achieved 32 Top 40 singles in Canada, the Grammy-nominated, multiple Juno Award-winning artist and Canadian Music Hall of Fame inductee faced a different challenge.
Fiction asked the music icon to leave behind a familiar form for something more expansive and solitary. The Eternal Return moves beyond the question of whether Peter can succeed as a painter toward a harder one: How much of ourselves do we stake on the things we believe matter, and what happens when recognition does not come?
“Writing a novel is a long and winding road, and you are the only one walking it. I love the sheer loneliness of it all,” says Hart.
The Eternal Return is a darkly funny, philosophical, and emotionally searching novel about passion, pain, purpose, possibility, and the struggle to live honestly when life refuses to unfold according to plan.
The title draws on Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence. In Hart’s telling, struggle, repetition, and disappointment are not simply obstacles to overcome; they are the raw material from which meaning is made the substance of who we are. Hart intertwines these themes through the life-awakening journey of a Manhattan art curator who thought he was ready.
“The world of painting gave me an intimate setting that mirrored much of what I had experienced in the music business, yet carried its own weight, its own jurisdiction. Writing this book was the most challenging creative experience of my life.” — Corey Hart
About RE: BOOKS
RE: BOOKS is a prominent independent publishing house in Toronto, founded by renowned 10-time bestselling author Rebecca Eckler. Guided by the belief that “what’s good is read and what’s read is good,” RE: BOOKS delivers captivating stories from big idea to bestseller list. Dedicated to championing bold, fresh, and engaging Canadian voices, the press publishes a wide range of fiction and non-fiction titles.
Visit: rebooks.ca
