★Winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award

A blackly comic and heart-rending odyssey by the inimitable author of Down to the Dirt.

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. Johnny is looking at three to five years in a maximum-security prison in eastern Canada and he 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 the country to deliver her ashes to a fabled beach on the west coast.

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.

We’ll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night is the story of one man’s kicking-and-screaming attempt to recuperate from a life of petty crime and shattered relationships, and somehow accept and maybe even like the new man emerging from within, the one he so desperately needs to become.

Joel Thomas Hynes is a multidisciplinary, award-winning artist. Hynes has worked in the film and television industry for more than 15 years as a writer, an actor and a director. He wrote and directed two award-winning short films, ‘Clipper Gold’ and ‘Little Man,’ and is the author of numerous acclaimed books and stage plays, including the novels Down to the Dirt and Right Away Monday. Down to the Dirt was a finalist for the Winterset Award and the Atlantic Book Awards and was longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His screen adaptation of his book Say Nothing Saw Wood was nominated for four Canadian Screen Awards, and he has performed numerous lead and principle roles for TV and film, including Down to the Dirt, Book of Negroes, ReGenesis, Rookie Blue, Republic of Doyle and, currently, Orphan Black.