STRAY DOGS

(Paperback)

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Description

Turner is a high school dropout newly arrived in Toronto. After taking a job selling dictionaries for a local grifter named Romeo Silva, the day goes wrong and Turner gets into a fight with a biker who ends up getting stabbed in the head. On the run from both Romeo and the Devils Children BIKER GANG , Turner and his pals, Millboy and Frankie, find an abandoned summerhouse in which to hide out. But tensions within the group damage personal relationships as external threats converge to destroy the lives they had. In this hardboiled coming-of-age story that explores friendship, sex, drugs, and family: three teenagers on the edge of seventeen discover themselves and each other during a road trip of wild reversals on a journey that will haunt them forever.

Reviews

Richard John Parfitt has been writing taut, tense, economical rock songs since he lived in the same block of flats as my grandmother in Croesyceiliog South Wales. His band the 60ft Dolls ruled the roost in my hometown back then. Now he writes taut, tense, economical, prose and this novel is as fierce, catchy and full of hooks as any of his brilliant songs. Jon Langford, The Mekons

"'I told em we were no thrill-kill cult and that we were just ordinary dictionary salesmen on a delivery job gone wrong.' Richard John Parfitt's blood-soaked fever dream of Toronto teens at the turn of the 80s reads likeTaxi Driverturned upside down; the street kids remix.' John Williams, author ofThe Cardiff Trilogy

"Immediately after finishing this novel I knew it would haunt me for a long, long time. It's a compelling and driven picaresque of great humour, beauty, horror and intense emotional weight, acutely attuned to the world's hopes and heartbreaks. Fantastic, in several senses''- Niall Griffiths, author of Broken Ghosts, winner2020 Wales Book of the Year

Stray Dogsis a raw, visceral and hard-hitting read, with a distinct and memorable voice. It takes readers deep into the gritty depths of the city and into the minds and hearts of the characters we find there - Emma Hooper, author ofWe Should Not Be Afraid of the Sky

"Ihad a blast reading Richard John Parfitt's debut novel,Stray Dogs, It's grimly humorous, with several laugh-out-loud moments. Entering territory frequentedby Cormac McCarthy, Scott Phillips, and the Coen Brothers, I was darkly entertained from start to finish."Gavin Cologned-Brookes, author of Rereading William Styron and American Lonesome: The Work of Bruce Springsteen

Author Bio

Richard John Parfitt is a writer, musician and academic. Bornand living in south Wales, he spent two years as a teenager not going to school in Toronto, Canada.In the mid 1990s he was founder member of rock group 60ft Dolls, scoring a top 40 album and a number of hits. The group played with well-known bands like Oasis, Dinosaur Jr, and the Sex Pistols. As a songwriter and musician, he has worked for many high-profile artists including Dido, Duffy and McAlmont & Butler.As a writer, he was shortlisted for theNew Welsh ReviewRheidol Prize. He has also had work published inPlanet: The Welsh Internationalist, The Conversation, and Wales Arts Review, The Portland Review and Red Pepper.