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By turns savagely funny and piercingly heart-rending, Right Away Monday is an extraordinary new novel from “the best young voice in years” (David Adams Richards) 
“The top cant count for much if you havent punched a shift or two on bottom”
Clayton Reid is stuck in a vicious cycle. He spends just as much time scraping the bottom as he does being high as a kite and can’t seem to find middle ground. A hopelessly self-destructive and at times unforgivably brutal young man, Clayton is a sometimes bartender at the Awl and Hatchet with a bad attitude that elicits love and loathing in equal measure. Over the course of a write-off year, Clayton wrestles with the conflicting desires of wanting to matter to somebody and to care for no one, wanting to prove he’s different from the so-called wasters around him but not enough to say no to a pint. In the filthy bars, cold back alleys and soiled bedrooms of downtown St. John’s that Clayton inhabits, we spend a debauched year with him as he drinks and dreams, fights and fails, screws and screws up. He lives his life as an eternal weekend, sure he can stop any time and accomplish great things. But then Clayton meets Isadora, who stirs something real and achingly human underneath the swagger, sending him on the bender of his life.
Right Away Monday is a stormy novel of unlikely beauty, peopled by unforgettable characters—including one Valentine Reid, Clayton’s burnt-out and battered rocker uncle; the lovely though world-weary Monica; and the shrewd Mike Quinn, slum landlord and owner of the Awl and Hatchet. Unnervingly authentic, these are the constituents of a world grown weary and wasted, with a new generation stumbling blindly behind. But oblivion is only skin deep. Beneath the wreckage of youthful distraction lie the vast and abiding questions that haunt our quietest moments—questions of destiny, fate, mortality and of our connections to one another. Ushering the chaos and uncertainty of this dark bar-room universe into the bright intensity of Hynes’ unflinching gaze, Right Away Monday will grab you by the throat and not let you go.

Right Away Monday

Literature & Fiction

Hynes, Joel Thomas

Genre Fiction

HarperCollins, Publishers

Jude Traynor has served his time in prison and now he's heading back to his hometown on the Southern Shore of Newfoundland. But first, he has to come to terms with who he was and what happened one night, years before, when he was barely seventeen years old. Joel Thomas Hynes's stunning exploration of guilt and remorse, of love and regret, received raves as an award-winning stage play; this is the novella that inspired the play, available at last in print. Hynes's pitch perfect ear for voice and his remarkable sense of dramatic cadence combine to form a story of great power and ultimately great humanity. This is Newfoundland Gothic at its best. Cover image and other drawings by Gerald L. Squires.

Say Nothing Saw Wood

Literary

Running the Goat

A blackly comic and heart-rending odyssey by the inimitable author of Down to the Dirt
Scrappy tough guy and three-time loser Johnny Keough is going a little stir-crazy awaiting trial for an alleged assault charge involving his girlfriend, Madonna, and a teapot. Facing three to five years in a maximum-security prison, Johnny knows this might just be the end of the road. But when Madonna doesn’t show up for court due to a fatal accident, shell-shocked Johnny seizes his unexpected “clean slate” as a sign from above and embarks on an epic hitchhiking journey across Canada to deliver her ashes to a fabled beach on the outskirts of Vancouver.
Johnny’s wanderings see him propelled in and out of the driver’s seat of stolen cars, knocking heads with cagey cops, nearly decapitated by a moose, coming face-to-face with his incarcerated biological father in a Kingston jail, and finding surprising connections with strangers on the lonely road west. But most of all, he revisits the choices and mistakes of his past—his relationships with his adoptive father and a cousin who meant the world to him, and his first real chance at love with the woman who is now lost to him. 
We'll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night is the story of one man’s kicking-and-screaming attempt to recuperate from a life of petty crime and shattered relationships, and somehow accept and maybe even like the new man emerging from within, the one he so desperately needs to become.

We'll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night: A Novel

Humor & Satire

Harper-perennial

Clayton Reid, a would-be playwright and sometimes bartender, is downtown St. John’s iconic man-about-town. Near-crippled by booze, drugs and dirty sex, Clayton, amongst the dozens of other burnt-out ghosts of Water Street, stumbles up and down the road of self-destruction, holding out a shallow hope that real life will one day fall from the sky. Then Clayton meets Isadora, a woman who stirs something achingly human in him, sending him on the ultimate bender of his life. Told with the same earthy and provocative style that won Hynes’ previous novel, Down to the Dirt, the Percy Janes First Novel Award, Right Away Monday is a stormy and savagely funny story of f―ing up and figuring it out.

Keith Kavanagh lost his virginity at 13 to a woman twice his age. He met his girlfriend while pissing on the hood of her father’s truck. He may have almost burned down the North Side of his Newfoundland outport hometown, but not even his best friend knows for sure. The transient nature of happiness is nowhere more profoundly evident than in the small town known as the Cove, where the hard-drinking, hard-fighting, hardticket hooligan Keith―along with his girlfriend, Natasha, and reluctant best friend, Andy―has spent the bulk of his chaotic years. Booze, drugs, sex and violence have kept his world from falling apart and shielded him from the vicious realities of life. But when Natasha leaves him, he must finally face his demons.

Down To The Dirt

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hynes, Joel Thomas. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Hynes, Joel Thomas

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hynes, Joel Thomas. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Right Away Monday

Say Nothing Saw Wood

We'll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night: A Novel

Right Away Monday

Down To The Dirt