Andrew Joyce is the author of the best-selling novel REDEMPTION: The Further Adventures of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. He has also penned the award-winning novel YELLOW HAIR. His other books include, MOLLY LEE, RESOLUTION: Huck Finn’s Greatest Adventure, Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups, ELLIS, and MAHONEY.
REDEMPTION: The Further Adventures of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer purports to answer the question: Whatever happened to Tom and Huck after they grew up and became men? It was Andrew’s first novel and won the 2013 Editors’ Choice Award for Best Western. His two follow-up novels bring Huck and Tom to the sunset of their lives. And even though they are part of a trilogy, all three were written to be read as stand-alone books.
Andrew’s perspective on life has been shaped at least partly by leaving home and hitting the road at the tender age of seventeen when he hitchhiked throughout the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The lessons learned and the adventures experienced during those years are chronicled in his short stories, many of which have been published in his fifth book, Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups.
If his hitching years helped shape Andrew’s life as a teen and young adult, his interest in the metaphysical defined the philosophy he lives by today, although that interest was seeded by a Native American holy man a young Andrew met while on the road. That introduction to the metaphysical world piqued Andrew’s curiosity and led him on a decades-long quest to find the answer to the age-old question: Why are we here? The simple answer, as he believes, is to make choices. Good, bad, or indifferent, the choices we make create the world in which we live. Simply choosing to get out of bed in the morning is an act of creation, according to Andrew.
When not engrossed in a book—or busy writing one—Andrew can be found out of doors, walking in the woods … preferably on secluded and remote trails where he is not likely to run into other human beings and where he can work out the plots and twists of his latest novel without distraction.
Andrew Joyce grew up in South Florida. His love for books started at an early age. Every Saturday his mother would pile him and his brothers into the family car and off they would go to the library. Andrew would roam the racks, pulling books from shelves, reading blurbs, and deciding what books he’d take home that week.
At first it was science fiction that held his interest. However, by the time he was in his early teens, he had read the library system’s complete catalogue of that genre. That’s when he branched out and discovered the greats of literature, such as Steinbeck, London, Dostoyevsky, Hesse, and L’Amour, to name but a few.
Two of his favorite books of all time are The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck and The Star Rover by Jack London.
Andrew has an eclectic taste in reading, ranging from the fictional works of Lee Child and David Baldacci to P.G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. In non-fiction, he enjoys reading biographies and books on science. He especially likes books about physics (written for the layman, of course).
A few of his other favorite authors are: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Sue Grafton, John D. MacDonald, Donald E. Westlake, Lawrence Block, and Robert B. Parker.
As you might have surmised, Andrew does not own a television set—flat screen or otherwise. There are just too many books in the world that must first be read before time can be allotted for the vast wasteland that is often television. Movies are another thing. Especially movies from the 1930s and ’40s.
A Few of Andrew’s Favorite Quotes:
“I would challenge you to a battle of wits, but I see you are unarmed!”—William Shakespeare
“Out of all the things I have lost, I miss my mind the most.”—Mark Twain
“I’m not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did.”—Yogi Berra
“Never memorize something that you can look up.”—Albert Einstein
“I’d like to live like a poor man, only with lots of money.”—Pablo Picasso
“Be yourself, everyone else is already taken.”—Oscar Wilde
“If I know what love is, it is because of you.”—Hermann Hesse
“Nobody gets everything in this life. You decide your priorities and you make your choices. I’d decided long ago that any cake I had would be eaten.”—Donald E. Westlake
“If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass.”—Lawrence Block
A Few of Andrew’s Favorite Steinbeck Passages:
“The concrete highway was edged with a mat of tangled, broken, dry grass, and the grass heads were heavy with oat beards to catch on a dog’s coat, and foxtails to tangle in a horse’s fetlocks, and clover burrs to fasten in sheep’s wool; sleeping life waiting to be spread and dispersed, every seed armed with an appliance of dispersal, twisting darts and parachutes for the wind, little spears and balls of tiny thorns, and all waiting for animals and the wind, for a man’s trouser cuff or the hem of a woman’s skirt, all passive but armed with appliances of activity, still, but each possessed the anlage of movement.”—The Grapes of Wrath
“The afternoon came down as imperceptibly as age comes to a happy man. A little gold entered into the sunlight. The bay became bluer and dimpled with shore-wind ripples. Those lonely fishermen who believe that the fish bite at high tide left their rocks and their places were taken by others, who were convinced that the fish bite at low tide.”—Tortilla Flat
“June is gay—cool and warm, wet and shouting with growth and reproduction of the sweet and the noxious, the builder and the spoiler. The girls in the body-form slacks wander High Street with locked hands while small transistor radios sit on their shoulders and whine love songs in their ears. The young boys, bleeding with sap, sit on the stools of Tanger’s Drugstore ingesting future pimples through straws. They watch the girls with level goat-eyes and make disparaging remarks to one another while their insides whimper with longing.”—The Winter of our Discontent
Andrew Joyce also pens the popular series, Danny the Dog, a humorous take on life with Andrew as written by his dog, Danny. A sample of which can be read here.
Andrew Joyce now lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts and has just published his latest novel Mahoney.
An Excerpt from Mahoney:
Most of the men imbibed their whiskey in the mess tent because of its relative warmth, but a few hearty souls took their liquor to the camp’s perimeter and enjoyed it around a roaring fire, where they would tell each other stories of the hardships they endured in Ireland, or on their voyage to America, or perhaps what they had encountered since arriving in the Land of Golden Paved Streets.
The reflected firelight flickered across awestruck faces and mirrored in the eyes of those who listened as stories were told of yesterday’s indignities and tomorrow’s aspirations. The look in those yearning eyes spoke of hopes and dreams. The laughter heard around the fire conveyed a sense that somehow it would all work out. For a few short hours, on Saturday nights, in the deep woods of a place none of them had ever heard of before, the constant fear that lived within their hearts was banished from their lives.
In time, they would prevail. Their sons and daughters would one day stand straight and tall as proud Americans … as proud as their fathers had been to be Irish.