My Camino by Patrick Warner

Reeling from the Night of Nights, an unexpected blockbuster art show, Floss, a transgender New York gallery owner, invites subversive installation artist Budsy and their best friend the Apostle John to cycle the Camino de Santiago. When Floss tells her friends about her shocking experience at the hands of the King of the New York art scene, the journey becomes an anti-pilgrimage—from spiritual discovery to revenge fantasy. Moving from New York to Spain to Dublin, My Camino is a book about misfits, identity, art and spirituality narrated by the audacious Apostle John whose telling sometimes rhymes, is often hilarious and is always a blistering account of the contemporary art world.

Author

Patrick Warner has published five collections of poetry: All Manner of Misunderstanding; There, There; Mole; Precious; and Octopus, and a novel, One Hit Wonders. He has twice won the E.J. Pratt Poetry Prize. Warner grew up in Claremorris, County Mayo, Ireland. He emigrated to Canada in 1980, and since then has mostly lived in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

PRAISE FOR MY CAMINO

“Scathing, riotous…Warner’s writing throughout is electric. It’s boisterous, bawdy, turbocharged and entirely entertaining. Apostle John is the best kind of narrator — loudly confident one moment, humble and introspective the next, a man of sage opinions and witty, often heartbreaking anecdotes about [his friends] Budsy and Floss, migration, philosophy, music, and the world at large. Reading the book feels like sidling up to the bar with a highly intelligent and hilarious new companion…My Camino is an energizing read, a book that asks cheeky and powerful questions about what it means to create (or abstain) in the early 21st Century.”—Toronto Star

“An original and inherently compelling read by an author with a knack for the kind of narrative storytelling that keeps the reader riveted from cover to cover…” — Midwest Book Review

“An uproarious satire of the art world and a joyful, episodic novel that will appeal to anyone looking for a non-dreary read.”—Foyles

“[A] rollicking, peregrinating tale…” — The Packet

PRAISE FOR PATRICK WARNER

“Warner has a wonderful skill for wielding rhythm and rhyme…engaging and memorable.” —Canadian Literature

“Warner’s poems can be comical, tender, brutal … they are always enlightening in their implied connections, sublime in their musical inventiveness.” —Sunday Independent

“I don’t know if anyone in contemporary poetry is bearing more eloquent, precisely strange witness to the certainty of their doubts than Warner.” —ARC Poetry Magazine