Finalist for the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction, winner of the Canadian Book Club Award, and recipient of the Word Guild Award for Best Fiction, Monday Rent Boy is an unforgettable literary novel about friendship, mentorship, the consequences of being a bystander, and the courage it takes to finally tell the truth.
You never forget the friend who taught you who you were—or the day you failed him.
Arthur Barnes and Ernie Castlefrank are thirteen-year-old outsiders growing up in the Somerset countryside of the 1980s. Arthur finds refuge in books. Ernie is a mathematical prodigy with an unshakable instinct to protect those more vulnerable than himself. Together they discover the rarest gift either has ever known: someone who truly believes in them. A bookshop owner.
But when Ernie blows the whistle on a horrifying truth that no adult is willing to confront, he vanishes without a trace. Arthur is left with a question that will shadow him for the rest of his life:
Could I have saved Ernie Castlefrank?
Decades later, long-buried secrets begin to emerge, forcing Arthur to confront the friendship that shaped him, the silence that defined him, and the extraordinary bookseller who taught him that hope is found not in forgetting, but in finally telling the truth.
Some childhood experiences shape who we become. Others haunt us forever.
