Come on in, leave your shoes on, help yourself to a drink. All this came about because I have a new novel - ALL THAT MONK BUSINESS - scheduled for release in 2021, and given the help I’ve had from friends, family and my publisher, it’s only fitting to decorate the air with some publicity. We have a ways to go, so in the meantime I thought I’d serve up some short memoir-like stories. I’ll be doing so on a regular basis, and with some luck and encouragement from those of you who drop in from time to time, I’ll be able to get a decent number of them down before they leak from my brain completely. There’s more than one way to get to the stories, so keep an eye out and zap on the ones you find convenient. Enjoy.
— Barry
New novel available now
Reviews for “All That Monk Business”.
““A novel can’t be everything to everyone, but some novels can be many things to many people. All That Monk Business, by actor, comedian, and writer Barry Kennedy, is one of these. It’s not often that both the title of the novel and the cover illustration give such a strong signal of a book’s flavour — or, in this case, many flavours. In addition to the joyous word-play in the title are the sprawling implications of “All” and the twists and turns implicit in “business,” some of it indeed monkey business, some of it commercial business, some of it the doings of the Monk family.” ”
“I hope this book becomes a film.
All That Monk Business offers a canny insight into a clamour of disparate and occasionally desperate characters on Vancouver’s East Side. As their stories unfurl, they become deftly woven into a kaleidoscope of community whose members will resonate in your bones long after you’ve turned the last page.”
“Funny, snappy, and smart, All That Monk Business is a fond and meticulously detailed portrait both of East Vancouver, in all its glorious weirdness that no amount of gentrification can quite wash away, and of Buddy Monk, a man in dangerous middle life who might be pitiable but is a long way from pathetic. Warm and alienating, loving and litigious, Buddy — barber, agitator, perambulator — is a wonderful, complicated creation, the Leopold Bloom of Commercial Drive, and Barry Kennedy, who created Buddy and the many life-sustaining planets caught in his orbit, is one hell of a good writer.”
Denise Donlon
Watch the online Book Launch, recorded on zoom, and hosted by Ali Hassan.