Showing Right Away Monday by Joel Thomas Hynes

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.