Skip to main content Skip to search Skip to search

Fiction Literary

Ablutions

by (author) Patrick deWitt

Publisher
House of Anansi Press Inc
Initial publish date
Apr 2012
Category
Literary
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781770892149
    Publish Date
    Apr 2012
    List Price
    $18.95
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781770892156
    Publish Date
    Apr 2012
    List Price
    $14.95

Add it to your shelf

Where to buy it

Description

From the author of the award-winning The Sisters Brothers comes a dark, boozy, and hilarious tale from the LA underworld.

A nameless barman tends a decaying bar in Hollywood and takes notes for a book about his clientele. Initially, he is morbidly amused by watching the regulars roll in and fall into their nightly oblivion, pitying them and their loneliness. In hopes of uncovering their secrets and motives, he establishes tentative friendships with them. He also knocks back pills indiscriminately and treats himself to gallons of Jameson's. But as his tenure at the bar continues, he begins to lose himself, trapped by addiction and indecision. When his wife leaves him, he embarks on a series of squalidly random sexual encounters and a downward spiral of self-damage and irrational violence. To cleanse himself and save his soul, he attempts to escape …

About the author

 

Patrick deWitt was born on Vancouver Island in 1975. He is the author of two critically acclaimed novels: Ablutions and The Sisters Brothers, which won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Stephen Leacock Medal, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

 

Patrick deWitt's profile page

Editorial Reviews

... Ablutions is a seedy, boozy haiku. Reed thin, yet razor-sharp and as muscular as can be. This earliest deWitt is brilliant.

January Magazine

Dark, booze-ridden and utterly fascinating.

The Sun Times

[Patrick deWitt] has an ear for cadence and an eye for detail ... Ablutions doesn't glorify alcoholism, but nor does it present a moral, skilfully dodging the traps it sets itself.

Guardian

Other titles by

Related lists