Monday Rent Boy

Winner of the 2025 Canadian Book Club Award for Fiction
A McNally Robinson and Winnipeg Free Press bestseller

“Monday Rent Boy is most successful in its examination of the fraught, complex relationships formed between individuals in the wake of trauma. Doherty’s investment in the quasi-maternal tenderness between Miss Philipps and Arthur is especially rewarding. The novel is also a steadfast testament to the curative, emancipatory powers of literature…. Monday Rent Boy is an honourable attempt to give voice to an issue which is all too often silenced.” —The Montreal Review of Books
“This unflinching yet incredibly gentle depiction of the experience of two boys abused in the Catholic Church brings to life a tragedy that ended up being global in scope but began as unspeakable acts committed against one child after another. A stunning, literary take on a dark, heartbreaking slice of humanity.” Carrie Mac, bestselling author of Last Winter

“Susan Doherty brilliantly brings to life the soaring, simple joy of childhood, even as she guides us fearlessly and fascinatingly into the origins of the dark web. Monday Rent Boy is a compelling page-turner, a sensitive yet stark portrait of crimes against childhood and ultimately a triumphant testament to the healing power of friendship.” —Ann-Marie MacDonald, award-winning author of Fayne

“Monday Rent Boy is a masterfully wrought novel that goes to some very dark places—secluded church vestries, locked basements, the murkiest corners of child exploitation. But Susan Doherty, armed with a belief in the inherent value of truth-telling, stares down every horror. Like her characters Arthur and Ernie—fending for themselves and each other against seemingly insuperable odds—her writing holds out hope.” —Ian McGillis, journalist and author of A Tourist’s Guide to Glengarry

“If fools rush in where angels fear to tread, then Susan Doherty is the holiest of fools. Her haunting, brave, brilliantly realized work exposes with a nuanced compassion the devastating effects of the ‘dark web’ that is pedophilia. Only radical love can counter radical evil, and this extraordinary book lights the way.” —James FitzGerald, author of What Disturbs Our Blood, winner of the 2010 Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize

“A searing novel that cuts painfully close to the truth: the vulnerability of children, the sly grooming by sexual predators, the guilt, the fearful silence and the buried secrets of the victims—and how the Internet made all of this a multi-million-dollar business. This book will shock, scare and anger you—all the more so because it is all too real.” —Julian Sher, author of One Child at a Time: The Global Fight to Rescue Children from Online Predators

“An unflinching exploration of the traumatic legacy of childhood sexual abuse that is rife with anger, but also offers hope of a way forward.” —Toronto Star

Susan Doherty’s award-winning debut novel, A Secret Music (2015), was followed four years later by The Ghost Garden, the biography of a woman living with schizophrenia. She has worked on staff for Maclean’s, and freelanced for the International Herald Tribune, La Tribune de Gen ve, and the Independent in London; for eighteen years she ran her own advertising production company. She has served on the boards of the Royal Conservatory of Music, the Quebec Writers’ Federation and Nazareth House, a home for those afflicted by addiction and homelessness. Since 2009, she has volunteered at the Douglas Institute, a psychiatric hospital, working with people living with severe mental illness. She is married to the educator Hal Hannaford.

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