Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet
Luke Hunter thinks he’s joking when he tells a good friend exactly when – 8:37 the following morning – and how – hit by a red van from out of town – that friend will die. But when events unfold as Luke foretold, he wants none of it: he has enough problems being an average teenager without the added burden of seeing into the future – not to mention the ever-after. Terrified, but pretending not to be, Luke pushes his friends and family away, while the local news crew, a Christian fundamentalist preacher and a missing girl’s frantic mother all draw nearer, seeking to profit from Luke’s new-found ‘gift’.
Written in clear, precise prose, Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet is a darkly comic coming-of-age novel with a difference. Hormonal and humorous, exhilarating and wise, it is a book about fear and truth, life and death, and the music that plays inside us all.
Written in clear, precise prose, Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet is a darkly comic coming-of-age novel about death and life.
Joanne Proulx has had short stories published in literary magazines in America and Canada. This is her first novel.
She lives in Ontario.
Joanne says of ANTHEM that she wrote it when she was ‘pressed up close to death [her sister’s] with a war sounding in the background.’ Just like Luke Hunter, she and her nephews were ‘thrown up hard against things, trying to figure out how to survive, searching for something to believe in’. Her true-life insights are part of what brings this story so vividly, so movingly to life on the page.