A.D. Hopkins Releases THE BOYS WHO WOKE UP EARLY

Award-winning journalist, author and editor A.D. Hopkins delivers an authentic story of adolescence and racism set in small-town Appalachia at the end of the Eisenhower years with his fiction debut, The Boys Who Woke Up Early [Imbrifex Books, ISBN: 9781945501272].

The gravy train hasn't stopped in the hollers of western Virginia for more than thirty years when Stony Shelor starts his junior year at Jubal Early High. Class divides and racism are still the hardened norms in 1959, and violence lies coiled under the calm surface, ready to strike at any time.

On the high school front, the cool boys are taking their wardrobe and music cues from hip TV private dick Peter Gunn, and Dobie Gillis is teaching them how to hit on pretty girls. There's no help for Stony on the horizon, though. Mary Lou Martin is the girl of his dreams, and she hardly knows Stony exists. Adding to his adolescent struggles, Stony can't seem to stay out of juvenile court and just may end up in reform school. A long, difficult year stretches out in front of him when a new boy arrives in town: likable bullshit artist Jack Newcomb who has Gunn and Gillis - along with his jazz clarinet - down to a tee.

Jack draws Stony into his fantasy of being a private detective, and the two boys start hanging around the county sheriff's office. Accepted as sources of amusement and free labor, the aspiring gumshoes land their first case after the district attorney's house is burglarized. Later, the boys hatch an ingenious scheme to help the deputies raid an illegal speakeasy and brothel. All the intrigue feels like fun and games to Jack and Stony, until a gunfight with a hillbilly boy almost gets them killed. And yet the stakes rise even higher when the boys find themselves facing off against the Ku Klux Klan.

"I wanted to craft a tale that captured the era of social change I lived through myself as a teenager. My characters are inspired by real people who have always fascinated me: bullshit artists, straight shooters, and those who somehow manage to be both simultaneously. All three kinds can be remarkable friends," says Hopkins.

In The Boys Who Woke Up Early, fists fly, guns blaze, and the Ku Klux Klan is hiding in plain sight. On its surface an adolescent adventure story, the novel is a sensitively crafted portrait of a time when America, like Stony and his friends, woke up to the need for change. For a country once again at a crossroads, this novel serves as a timely wake-up call.

A.D. HOPKINS has worked for newspapers in Virginia, North Carolina, and Las Vegas, Nevada, where he was inducted into the Nevada Press Association's Newspaper Hall of Fame. He is the author of The First 100: Portraits of the Men and Women Who Shaped Las Vegas, and is an authority on early Nevada gunslingers. The Boys Who Woke Up Early is his first novel.

The Boys Who Woke Up Early is now available everywhere books are sold.

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