Georgia Toews

Subversive, captivating and vividly attuned to both the extraordinary and the mundane, Georgia Toews’ debut novel Hey, Good Luck Out There is a furious and hilarious journey through the relentless, soul-baring world of addiction and recovery. After an amazingly unpleasant pizza party intervention, our twenty-two-year-old narrator checks into a women’s rehab facility, confined "for her own safety" without meaningful contact with the outside world. For escape, she and her fellow patients have only stilted phone calls with their disappointed and concerned parents, daily meetings in the form of inspirational speeches from wealthy ex-alcoholics and lifestyle gurus, visits to the doctor, and clandestine trips to a dingy internet cafe. For our narrator, a neon-pink journal gifted by her grandmother with gold embossed letters on the front—“Let Them Eat Cake!”—is her only comfort amid an endless carousel of strangeness and unease. When she is discharged from rehab after thirty punishing days, returned to Toronto’s streets without resources, a job, or an apartment, and tasked with staying clean despite a seemingly bottomless urge to give up, the book What next? What happens in the aftermath of your lowest low? Alone, and at war with an intrusive inner creature, at last she begins the process of making a home for herself in the world. Hey, Good Luck Out There introduces a dynamic new voice in Georgia Toews is at once unguardedly truthful, gritty, and darkly funny, with a sardonic, wholly original sense of the absurd.

A razor-sharp dramedy following a twenty-something female comic as she navigates family grief, a dysfunctional friendship, and a date gone very wrong, from Georgia Toews, author of Hey, Good Luck Out There.Virginia is twenty-three and a stand-up comedian. In between working the rounds of Toronto’s small comedy club circuit and auditioning for paper towel commercials, she is tiptoeing around her depressed roommate and childhood friend, Haley, and having biweekly dinners with her bereaved stepdad, Dale, while trying to manage her own grief at the loss of her mother. She is also secretly working to get the green card that will be her ticket to L.A. and, she hopes, a glittering comedy career.But when Dale tells her that he wants to sell their family home, and when a date with a fellow comic turns into a shattering encounter, she is forced to confront the limits of comedy—and friendship. Not every experience can be neatly packaged into a “bit,” and not every friendship is meant to last.By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Nobody Asked for This reaches into the messy depths of love, friendship, grief and trauma and, like all the best jokes, is utterly unpredictable.