At Dawn

Caught in a riptide of haphazard underemployment, at turns violent and unpredictable, suffering under a bad economy with no family or friends to speak of, Stratton Brown longs for the chance to escape his small-town past and build a new life. He sets out for Chicago, where he meets a new and fresh hell: a nine-to-fiver in a nondescript, meaningless company, and an obsessive love affair with woman who may be a bit too attached to her abusive ex-boyfriend. Is this all America has to offer its twentysomethings? He’ll soon have to figure out that beneath the gruff labor of building a new life lies the presence of something much more true: a way past his violent childhood and a new path to the American dream.

At Dawn is a literary debut of a fresh and powerful male voice in fiction."Hughes combines coming-of-age tale, portrait of the artist as a young man, and father-son saga in a well-crafted novel." —Publishers WeeklyJobie Hughes was born in Renton, Washington, but raised from the age of three in the quaint and mostly blue-collar town of Spencer, Ohio. He was a high school state champion in wrestling, attended Ohio University on an athletic scholarship, and graduated with a business degree. After five years of banal work earning minimal pay, he left capitalism behind and moved to New York City to attend Columbia University’s School of the Arts. He graduated in May 2009 with an MFA in Creative Writing. Hughes currently lives in Michigan. He is the author or two previous novels, both of which were #1 New York Times best sellers and have sold over a million copies worldwide. His work has been translated into twenty-six languages and published in forty-eight countries.