Joe Bond sat outside of Newport’s Roebling Point Books, selling his debut novel Hope House on a warm summer day. He was flanked by two generations: His father and son, both buzzing about the novel on his behalf. The scene is fitting for what Hope House is, at its core, about—the search for family, camaraderie, and community.
Flip to the novel’s dedication, and that feeling is cemented. “For you, Dad, and for the boys.”
Set in 1980s Kentucky, Hope House released from Hub City Press earlier this summer. The novel is set to be released as an audiobook on November 12. The boys within the novel hail from a familiar network of places: Appalachia, Newport, Covington, Cincinnati, Lexington, Louisville, and other towns in Eastern and Western Kentucky.
“I grew up around boy’s homes,” says Bond via a phone interview. “Dad ran them in Eastern Kentucky. From my earliest memories, I was always around and going to work with him. I was always around the boys. I didn’t know anything different. It was a fact of life.”
Growing up around group homes from an early age helped Bond understand how things could easily go wrong for people.
“You could make a decision, especially as a teenager, that affects the rest of your life. It didn’t mean you were a bad kid or a bad person, it might just mean you were in a situation that set you up for failure,” says Bond, adding that being exposed to people with different lived experiences made the world much bigger and more complicated.
Longlisted for The Center for Fiction 2026 First Novel Prize, the bildungsroman is told through the eyes of a 14-year-old boy named AWOL, but weaves through the lives of similarly-aged characters —Damico, Smoove, and Peanut—as each navigate a five-phase program.
While the story is fictional, Bond drew from his own experiences. “I was always listening to their stories. I think I was young enough and quiet enough that they would tell their stories [to me].”
When Bond sent his dad the first chapter of Hope House, he didn’t immediately respond.
“I had a bad feeling. I live way far away from him now,” says Bond. “I called my mom and said, ‘I sent Dad that story hours ago. What’s going on?’ And she said, ‘He’s back in the bedroom crying.’ I felt bad about that, but I also felt that I got it down right. His reaction was really positive. He loves the book. He tries to get everyone to buy it. I sent him chapters as I worked on it. He would try to tell me who my characters really were, and we’d jokingly argue about whether they were my characters or his boys.”
As Bond grew up, he began to understand the boys’ stories better, and the fraught situations many had been dealt.
Hope House is written with care and honesty; the novel neither sensationalizes nor romanticizes the boys’ lives. What’s left is a naturalistic, compassionate portrait of kids trying to find their footing and, along the way, each other.
“The divide was really between the kids who had been there and the kids who were coming in,” says Bond of the group home’s dynamics. “When the culture was good, it could be like a broken family finding a way to mend itself. The setting was a big part of it; you get kids from all different places. They’ve been kicked out of society. The counselor, Mr. Watts, is trying to reintegrate them, which he’s not perfectly skilled at because he’s an outsider, too.”
Photograph courtesy Joe Bond
While the boys in Hope House are a family in their own right, they face stigma from the surrounding community. That element is also pulled from real-life observation: While some people showed boys in the group homes kindness, Bond reflects that others did not want them enmeshed in their community.
“They’re complicated. They’ve made mistakes,” says Bond. “To try and get down their full humanity and show that they’re bigger than the things they’ve done, they still have hearts, and they still want help to be a part of something, to have a family—basic human things—was really important to me.”
Now living in New Orleans, Bond has worked as a child-care worker, copy editor, security guard at a psychiatric hospital, and a research librarian. It wasn’t until he had a son of his own that he began to revisit the stories of the boys he knew.
“Those voices and those stories came flooding back to me. I started writing about them,” says Bond. “That’s how Hope House got its start.”
Hope House also stemmed from Bond’s short story, Damico, which won The Masters Review’s Short Story Award in 2018. When he first began writing, he didn’t have a lot of time as a parent of a young child. So, he wrote poems. Damico was the first poem he formed into a story, but he already had others in the works.
The novel grew out of a want to knit those disparate stories together into one cohesive narrative.
“Honestly, I had too much material,” says Bond. “I had too many characters because so much of it was based on what I knew, but that ends up being fertile ground for the imagination… I had to go back and cut characters and condense the timeline.”
AWOL’s voice was the first thing that came to Bond in Hope House, and even when writing Damico. As a narrator, AWOL oscillates between using the pronouns “I” and “we.” Part of that, Bond says, is AWOL’s reluctance to share his own story.
In a good group home, Bond says that you could hear the “we” when you walked through the doors. That is, a sense of common identity.
“It was a really powerful thing: You have a lot of kids who have not fit in, they’ve been cast out, and they find this togetherness in a home,” says Bond. “It was powerful in real life.”
Hope House ultimately isn’t interested in delivering easy answers.
“Some of the value in the novel is wrestling with how responsible you are for the decisions you make when everything is set up against you,” says Bond. “To not have any clear answers is reflective of real life.
“I like to believe [the boys] do have a say in their lives, but it’s important to acknowledge that the deck is stacked against them.”
