WASTE — Andrew F. Sullivan

WASTE: a novel

"A brutal, mesmeric debut novel."

THE GLOBE AND MAIL

"A rollicking, offensive, and genuinely enjoyable ride."

THE TORONTO STAR

" To enter Sullivan's first novel is to spend quality time with some of the worst people in the world."

KIRKUS REVIEWS

"An insightful gut-punch to the soul for any reader tough enough to take it"

LITREACTOR

"One of the most violent novels CanLit has ever seen"

CBC BOOKS

The Globe & Mail - Best Books of 2016

CBC Books - Best Debut Novels of 2016

The Walrus - Best Books of 2016

Writers' Trust of Canada - Best Books of 2016

SUMMARY

A breakneck tour of a brokedown city littered with ruptured families, missing mothers, busted bowling alleys, and neon motels.

Larkhill, Ontario. 1989. A city on the brink of utter economic collapse. On the brink of violence. Driving home one night, unlikely passengers Jamie Garrison and Moses Moon hit a lion at fifty miles an hour. Both men stumble away from the freak accident unharmed, but neither reports the bizarre incident.

Haunted by the dead lion, Moses storms through the frozen city with his pathetic crew of wannabe skinheads searching for his mentally unstable mother. Jamie struggles with raising his young daughter and working a dead-end job in a butcher shop, where a dead body shows up in the waste buckets out back. A warning of something worse to come.

Somewhere out there in the dark, a man is still looking for his lion. His name is Astor Crane, and he has never really understood forgiveness.

BUY THE BOOK: Canadians

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PRAISE FOR WASTE

"In some of the sharpest prose anyone is writing today, Andrew F. Sullivan vividly brings to life some of the most damaged and sorrowful characters ever encountered in fiction. Mark my words, Waste is going to be considered one of the best books of the year."

—Donald Ray Pollock, author of Knockemstiff and The Devil All The Time

"Balancing tenderness and brutality in the palm of his hand, Andrew F. Sullivan has carved out his own category to capture the ugliness of the world, his words always in search and service of some beating heart beneath the dirt. With Waste, Sullivan's deft prose hammers out a harsh, hard-fought harmony that compels you to sit down and listen."

—Miriam Toews, author of All My Puny Sorrows and A Complicated Kindness

“Waste is the unholy amalgam of Pollock’s The Devil All the Time, Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, and the films of Harmony Korine. Andrew F. Sullivan has written a scorcher. This book is riotously alive, pulsing with bad intentions—and very very dangerous.”

—Craig Davidson, author of Cataract City and Rust and Bone

"An unflinching, black-hearted story told with relentless, straight-razor prose. Waste, Andrew F. Sullivan's brilliantly concussive new novel, reminds me most of a literary cage match: busted, doomed characters tumbled together with no hope of escape--and it all makes for one hell of a show."

—Michael Christie, author of If I Fall, If I Die

REVIEWS FOR WASTE

"Waste is a brutal, mesmeric debut novel."

—The Globe and Mail

"Waste is a rollicking, offensive, and genuinely enjoyable ride."

—The Toronto Star

"One of the most violent novels CanLit has ever seen."

—CBC Books

"A confident storyteller whose darkly humorous and down-market prose has the cumulative effect of a Jackson Pollock canvas – except instead of paint, Sullivan’s medium is blood."

—Quill & Quire

"Waste continually tugs at our emotions. While his outlook and subject matter may be bleak, [Sullivan] is an unquestionably talented writer."

—Winnipeg Free Press

"Waste is an insightful gut-punch to the soul for any reader tough enough to take it"

—LitReactor

"Sometimes you don’t learn from events so much as you witness them. That’s what Sullivan has done here. He’s stood witness to people lost and forgotten, the dross of capitalism, the runoff of greed."

—The Spark

"No matter how steeped it may be in darkness, this novel is the basic story of, as Faulkner put it, the human heart in conflict with itself."

—Necessary Fiction

"Like watching a ’70s Italian horror movie while walking naked on a bed of coals."

—The Winnipeg Review

" A blown pupil of a novel"

—The Ottawa Review of Books

"A brilliant if bleak vision from a biting new voice"

—Type Books

"To enter Sullivan's first novel is to spend quality time with some of the worst people in the world. "

—Kirkus Reviews

"Waste offers a visceral reminder of the forces that keep people overwhelmed by inertia, stagnant and unable to act in their own best interests."

—The Walrus

"No shortage of dirt here: this is suburban Canadian Cringe-Lit at its finest."

—Library Bound

"The same tone of brutality and hilarity that Harry Crews created in A Feast of Snakes"

—Heavy Feather Review

"Waste does not offer a choice between good and evil, but between the seriously flawed and the amoral. It may not be the choice we want, but it’s the only one we’re given."

—Foreword

"Sullivan’s Larkhill is all terminal cases, and if he can’t save these lives, he at least honors them."

—The Solute