The fiction winner is We'll
All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night by Joel Thomas Hynes.
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.
The judges said, “Hynes’s portrait of Johnny Keough is an
act of full-throttle imagination and narrative invention. Johnny is a
startlingly original creation. His hilarious yet disturbing journey from St.
John’s to Vancouver is unforgettable, tragic and ultimately transcendent.”
For information about all 14 winners, go to http://canadacouncil.ca/press/2017/10/ggbooks-2017-winners.
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