In the 1960s and early '70s, thousands of youths were on the road, hitchhiking across Canada and the USA and travelling through Europe, living in rooming houses in cities like Vancouver and in communes in the country. Their individual stories played out on a canvas stretched across the frame of world events including Vietnam, Woodstock, Watergate, and the emerging environmental movement, often in a climate of idealism, protest, and anger.

The Rooming House follows several of these young men and women sharing an old home in Vancouver's Kitsilano district, tracking their loves, losses, and wanderings through the diary entries of two of them. It is both a coming-of-age novel about disaffected and aimless young people and an exploration of the events of those years, complete with a soundtrack of rock classics and notes for readers who weren't around then.