Wayne Johnston's next #1 bestseller brings us back to his home landscape of St. John's with a richly entertaining and wise coming-of age story that is also his funniest, sexiest novel yet, controversial in its issues, contemporary and then some in its depiction of humanity, reminiscent of John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany.                 Here comes little Percy Joyce, born in St. John's in the '50s, an outsider afflicted from birth with a congenital disfigurement but a regular boy on the cusp of teenagehood, fillled with yearning, wild with hormones, longing for what he can't have, for wanting to be let in...and let out; and his disturbingly alluring mother, Penelope, whose sex appeal fairly leaps off the page. Every man in St. John's lusts after her, inlcuding her sister-in-law Medina, her paying border, Pops MacDougall, with whom she carries on an affair of convenience--and Percy. They live in the Mount, home of the city's Catholic schools and most of its clerics, including the Archbishop of Newfoundland and the villainous Brother McHugh who will go to any lengths to bring Penelope and her unbaptized boy into the bosom of the Church. But there are darker secrets: Penelope and Medina's love is an illegal relationship in that time: if caught, they will be sent to the mental hospital, and Percy will be left alone. Will they be found out? Will Percy sleep with Penelope? Will Percy be lured into the Church? This rich, generous novel reminds us that we all long to be let in, to be loved, and that we can't always have, but sometimes do get, what we want.