The Time of Their Lives

by Wayne Johnston

Readers of The Story of Bobby O’Malley waited eagerly for the appearance of a second novel by Wayne Johnston. The Time of Their Lives is that novel: the chronicle of three generations in the life of a pioneer family in Newfoundland. Born in Harbour Deep, Grandfather Dad and Grandmother Mom were married and moved to the meadows, where they built a homestead and cleared the land. Children came, grew up and left. Grandchildren moved to the cities and finally Dad is left alone on his abandoned farm. The colours are darker here than they were in Bobby O’Malley, but The Time of their Lives has all the richness of humour and force of imagination that have made Wayne Johnston one of Canada’s best-known writers.

194 pages, Hardcover

First published July 30, 1987

About the author

Wayne Johnston was born and raised in Goulds, Newfoundland. After a brief stint in pre-Med, Wayne obtained a BA in English from Memorial University. He worked as a reporter for the St. John's Daily News before deciding to devote himself full-time to writing.

En route to being published, Wayne earned an MA in Creative Writing from the University of New Brunswick. Then he got off to a quick start. His first book, The Story of Bobby O'Malley, published when he was 27 years old, won the WH Smith/Books in Canada First Novel award for the best first novel published in the English language in Canada in that year. The Divine Ryans was adapted to a film, for which Wayne wrote the screenplay. Baltimore's Mansion, a memoire dealing with his grandfather, his father and Wayne himself, won the Charles Taylor Prize. Both The Colony of Unrequited Dreams and The Navigator of New York were on bestseller lists in Canada and have been published in the US, Britain, Germany, Holland, China and Spain. Colony was identified by the Globe and Mail newspaper as one of the 100 most important Canadian books ever produced.

Reviews

[David]

Second reading; the first, nearly 30 years ago. A very sad book. Again I find myself feeling that, although Johnston and I grew up more or less in the same place and time, much of what happens in the Newfoundland of his fiction is all but alien to me.

[Jeffrey Winsor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first book by Wayne Johnston I read. It is reminiscent of Percy Janes House of Hate. Absolutely worth the read. I have to admit though my favourite Wayne Johnston book was The Navigator of New York.