- Imprint: Penguin
- ISBN: 9781405988469
- Length: 302 pages
- Price: £9.99
Gabriel Tallent, author of My Absolute DarlingA rare, brilliant, generous, bighearted book that mines hope from the darkest and most difficult human experiences
Tom Newlands, author of Only Here, Only NowHope House is a stunningly beautiful debut; a novel of life on the margins, written with style and grace, and populated with characters that stay with you long after the final page
Kim Edwards, author of The Memory Keeper’s DaughterThis beautifully told novel, heartbreaking and heart-healing, illuminates what it means to call a place home
Aimee Bender, author of The Butterfly LampshadeA beautiful novel of such tender frankness, building the lives of this group of kids with bottomless care and a fiercely keen eye for detail and movement
Publishers Weekly, starred review[A] gut-punch of a debut ... Authentic and often heartbreaking ... A clarion call for the value of compassion and the possibility of rehabilitation
Chicago Review of BooksBond delivers blows right to your heart while also bringing so much care, love, and generosity to a population who are all too often pushed to the edges of society. Hope House is the type of book I’m thankful exists, and one that certainly deserves your undivided attention.
Kirkus, starred reviewA slow-burning but moving account of adolescence under duress. A haunting story of the search for a better life
Foreword, starred reviewWith sinewy, loquacious eloquence, the novel Hope House explores the tenuous cycles of youth rehabilitation and the innate need for belonging
The Masters ReviewBond writes about these societal complications alongside the solitude that these boys experience with touching eloquence. Hope House isn’t going to provide easy answers for helping delinquent youth. It isn’t about forgiveness any more than it is about punishment. It’s about learning to see difficult people, listening to their stories, and trying to understand them
Chapter16That will draw you in as a reader, but it’s something else that will make you really care: The Hope House boys may be delinquents and criminals — as they sometimes call themselves — but they’re not caricatures, sketches, stock characters. They’re fully fledged. They’re real boys with beating hearts beneath all those scars. They have dignity
About Joe Bond
Joe Bond grew up around group homes and residential treatment programs in eastern Kentucky. He’s been a child-care worker, a copy editor, a security guard at a psychiatric hospital and a research librarian at a law firm in Times Square. For several years he covered mixed martial arts fighting for ESPN and various magazines and newspapers throughout the U.S., Brazil and Japan. He began working on Hope House after his story “Damico” won the Masters Review Short Story Award. He lives in New Orleans.
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All editions
- Hardback 2026
- Paperback 2027
- Ebook 2026