Right Away Monday
A Novel
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Price:
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$29.95
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On Sale:
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19/04/2007
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Formats:
Hardcover
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New Page 1
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.
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Author Extras
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Critical Praise for
Right Away Monday
"Joel Hynes knows the horrors of a hard-liquor, cocaine-spiked hangover at four o'clock in the morning. But he also understands the ecstasies -- a woman with her shirt half-open, the wild plunges of conversation and occasionally, just occasionally, the authentic glimpses of wisdom that happen while you're getting there."
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David Gilmour, winner of the Giller Prize for A Perfect Night to Go to China
"Joel Hynes' Right Away Monday is a rip-roaring and chaotic down-and-out-in-St-John's novel about an alcoholic drug-addicted bartender and the women who love him in spite of himself. It's a raw comedy about how lost can the lost get before detox and redemption. It's hero is the Energizer Bunny of self-destruction and the anti-Christ of political correctness. It's the grunge rock of Can Lit."
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Douglas Glover, winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction for Elle
"Joel Thomas Hynes shows his literary expansion in this new novel about a young man burning with the resentment and angst of an abusive childhood. Both the hated villain and comic victim, Clayton Reid blunders through his days, riddling everyday events with passion and destruction, leaving love and loathing in his wake. Written in the tough language of its hero, Right Away Monday is a beautiful, suffering story by a gutsy new novelist."
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Donna Morrissey, author of Kit’s Law and Downhill Chance
"Hynes has created a gritty, beer-sloshed landscape along Water Street in St. John’s and created characters like Clayton who are indelibly etched on our hearts like a tattoo. The reader feels every prick of the needle but is left with a lasting impression, a lasting portrait."
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The Nova Scotian
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Down to the Dirt
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...
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Right Away Monday
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...
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