Down to the Dirt is Joel Thomas Hynes’ Percy Janes Award-winning first novel. The novel follows the hard-drinking, hard-living Keith Kavanagh from his sexual initiation by an older woman in the small community of his childhood to his quixotic quest for meaning in the big city. Kavanagh is one of Canadian literature’s most memorable and mesmerizing creations. He may appear hard as nails—a self-destructive hedonist, a dynamo of crackling energy and imminent violence—but at heart, he is (in the words of novelist Michael Crummey) “a troubled Holden Caulfield innocent” desperately searching for his place in a world that doesn’t seem to want or need him.