[]
Hope House
  • Published: 12 November 2026
  • ISBN: 9781405988476
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 302

Hope House

  • Joe Bond
Pre-order from…
Amazon Apple Books Google Play Kobo Booktopia eBooks.com

Demon Copperhead meets Les Choristes in this coming-of-age story in chorus, told through the intersecting lives of a group of troubled boys in a home for ‘delinquent’ young men in the American south in the 1980s

\"I don’t know about that, sir. We’re delinquents,\" said Damico. \"If you give us an inch, we’ll take the whole mile.\"
Watts laughed us off.
\"All I’m saying is there’s things we can do different. I’m talking about you fellas helping me get this right. What do you think?\"

They came from the streets, the sticks, and every place in between. They've stolen cars, dealt dope and hurt people. They've been hurt themselves. They’ve been labelled ‘delinquents’ and cast out from their families – if they ever had a family at all. Their futures promise prison - or worse - but for now, they've been brought together to live in an old house on a hill, and see about getting themselves - and each other - right.

Spirited, angry, confused, and misled, these are the boys of Hope House, an institution for ‘delinquent’ young men in 1980s Kentucky. There is Smoove, named for his distinctive walk after he was shot in both feet back home in Louisville. There’s Damico, reported for shoplifting and assault, even though that was only part of the story. There’s Bobby, who tells brave tales of adventures of coyotes but goes quiet at the thought of his father. And there’s Awol, who can’t stop running away, only to return to the place he knows best.

Deeply honest and soulful, Hope House is a novel about searching for belonging and lifting each other up; about coming of age into a society that’s already closed its doors; about lost boys who grapple with their pasts, dare to imagine different futures, and nurture the almost outrageous hope that they might just turn everything around.
  • Published: 12 November 2026
  • ISBN: 9781405988476
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 302

Praise for Hope House

Hope House is a stunningly beautiful debut; a novel of life on the margins, written with style and grace, and populated with characters that stay with you long after the final page

Tom Newlands, author of Only Here, Only Now

This beautifully told novel, heartbreaking and heart-healing, illuminates what it means to call a place home

Kim Edwards, author of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter

A beautiful novel of such tender frankness, building the lives of this group of kids with bottomless care and a fiercely keen eye for detail and movement

Aimee Bender, author of The Butterfly Lampshade

[A] gut-punch of a debut ... Authentic and often heartbreaking ... A clarion call for the value of compassion and the possibility of rehabilitation

Publishers Weekly, starred review

A rare, brilliant, generous, bighearted book that mines hope from the darkest and most difficult human experiences

Gabriel Tallent, author of My Absolute Darling

With sinewy, loquacious eloquence, the novel Hope House explores the tenuous cycles of youth rehabilitation and the innate need for belonging

Foreword, starred review

A slow-burning but moving account of adolescence under duress. A haunting story of the search for a better life

Kirkus, starred review

Bond writes about these societal complications alongside the solitude that these boys experience with touching eloquence. Hope House isn’t going to provide easy answers for helping delinquent youth. It isn’t about forgiveness any more than it is about punishment. It’s about learning to see difficult people, listening to their stories, and trying to understand them

The Masters Review

That will draw you in as a reader, but it’s something else that will make you really care: The Hope House boys may be delinquents and criminals — as they sometimes call themselves — but they’re not caricatures, sketches, stock characters. They’re fully fledged. They’re real boys with beating hearts beneath all those scars. They have dignity

Chapter16

Joe Bond’s excellent debut novel Hope House tells the story of a residential treatment home for wayward teenagers in 1980s Kentucky. The boys who inhabit the home are depicted lovingly, yet unflinchingly; there’s no denying their capacity for good or for ill

Southern Review of Books

Bond delivers hope in the darkness of times. His compassion for his characters is undeniable, and there is so much heart packed in these pages where he writes with such grace and beauty

Debutiful, 16 noteworthy debut books

Bond delivers blows right to your heart while also bringing so much care, love, and generosity to a population who are all too often pushed to the edges of society. Hope House is the type of book I’m thankful exists, and one that certainly deserves your undivided attention.

Chicago Review of Books