Joe Jones

Joe Jones is Anne Lamott's raucous novel of lives gathered around Jessie's Cafe, 'a restaurant from another era, the sort of broken-down waterfront dive one might expect to find in Steinbeck or Saroyan.' Jessie, 'thin, stooped and gorgeous at seventy-nine,' inherited the cafe years before and it has become home to a remarkable family of characters: Louise, the cook and vortex, 'sexy and sweet, somewhere on the cusp between curvaceous and fat'; Joe, devoted and unfaithful; Willie, Jessie's gay grandson, ('I thought he just had good posture,' said Jessie); Georgia, an empress dowager who never speaks; and a dozen others all living together in the sweet everyday. Lamott's rich and timeless themes are also here: love and loyalty, loss and recovery, staying on and staying together, the power of humor to heal and to bind. Out of print for fifteen years, Joe Jones is a novel of hilarity and joy