By Tom Osborne
From the author of Dead Man in the Orchestra Pit and Foozlers comes another tale of madcap human folly.
Louella Debra Poule is doing an eighteen-month stint on a weapons charge at a minimum-security institution up the Fraser Valley. Her drug-dealing, sometime-boyfriend Jimmy Flood and his sidekick, Blacky Harbottle, should have taken the rap, but their list of “priors” would have put them in the slammer for quite a little stay. Louella “did the right thing” and took the fall.
Six months into Louella’s sentence, her mother, whom she hasn’t seen in years, dies suddenly. After Louella’s early release, she discovers she has inherited a fair bit of money and a nice condo in a treed and quiet suburb of Vancouver. It is here that Louella sits in relative safety and obscurity, here that she decides to take some time away from the influence of her prior associates, reassess her life, tend her mother’s garden, and work through the agonizing steps from addiction back to the world of “normal” living.
But, needless to say, her past comes a-callin’ …
Praise for Budge:
“Budge is one of the more quirky, unconventional, picaresque novels to come along in a while. … To fully appreciate Budge, we must relinquish our trust to Osborne, a somewhat loopy shaman. … Tom Osborne warrants a great deal of praise for freshness of content, viewpoint, and plot. He knows how to use language with skill and verve. …” ForeWord (US)
By the same author:
Dead Man in the Orchestra Pit and Foozlers
John Thomas Osborne, aka J.T. Osborne, was born on Baffin Island in June of 1949. He has illustrated various books, including Mary Beth Knechtel’s under-acknowledged The Goldfish That Exploded and Social Credit for Beginners: An Armchair Guide (Pulp Press, 1986). J.T. Osborne is also author of several books of poetry, including Under the Shadow of Thy Wings (1986), 9 Love Poems, and Please Wait for Attendant to Open Gate. His first novel Foozlers was published by Anvil Press in 2004 and was followed in 2006 by Dead Man in the Orchestra Pit (Anvil). Osborne grew up in Kamloops, B.C. and Vancouver, co-founded Pulp Press Book Publishers (now Arsenal Pulp) in the early 1970s, and currently resides in Maple Ridge, B.C.
