NATIONAL BESTSELLER For readers of Kristine Barnett's The Spark, Andrew Solomon's Far From the Tree and Ian Brown's The Boy in the Moon, here is a heartfelt, funny and surprising memoir about one year spent driving a bus full of children with special needs.
With his last novel, Cataract City, Craig Davidson established himself as one of our most talented novelists. But before writing that novel and before his previous work, Rust and Bone, was made into a Golden Globe-nominated film, Davidson experienced a period of poverty, apparent failure and despair. In this new work of riveting and timely non-fiction, Davidson tells the unvarnished story of one transformative year in his life and of his unlikely relationships with a handful of unique and vibrant children who were, to his initial astonishment and bewilderment, and eventual delight, placed in his care for a couple of hours each day--the kids on school bus 3077. One morning in 2008, desperate and impoverished while trying unsuccessfully to write, Davidson plucked a flyer out of his mailbox that read, "Bus Drivers Wanted." That was the first step towards an unlikely new career: driving a school bus full of special-needs kids for a year. Armed only with a sense of humour akin to that of his charges, a creative approach to the challenge of driving a large, awkward vehicle while corralling a rowdy gang of kids, and unexpected reserves of empathy, Davidson takes us along for the ride. He shows us how his evolving relationship with the kids on that bus, each of them struggling physically as well as emotionally and socially, slowly but surely changed his life along with the lives of the "precious cargo" in his care. This is the extraordinary story of that year and those relationships. It is also a moving, important and universal story about how we see and treat people with special needs in our society.
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Craig Davidson is the author of Rust and Bone, which was made into a critically acclaimed film; Sarah Court; and The Fighter. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his work has appeared in Esquire, GQ, and the Washington Post. He lives in Toronto.
John Cleland (1709–1789) was an English writer who is best known for his erotic novel Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. An employee of the British East India Company, Cleland spent extended periods in Bombay, India, until recalled to England because of his father’s illness. With no financial support from his family, Cleland amassed enough debt to land in Fleet Prison, where he is believed to have composed Fanny Hill. His subsequent arrest following the publication of Fanny Hill prompted Cleland to withdraw the novel, and while it was not legally published for over a hundred years, it continued to sell well as a pirated work. Cleland never achieved professional or financial success with his writing.