Watcha Gonna Do Boy...Watcha Gonna Be? is a novel about one young man's dream of following in his grandfather's footsteps instead of heading off to university. He is the breakaway, the one who learns, not in the feedbag university, but in the streets ... "around the station part of town." It is also a book about discovery - the discovery of what it means to grow from the dreams of one's teenage years into the happy, reckless reality of young manhood. And it is filled with people ... pick-swinging Railroad Ray Malone and other members of a salty railroad gang, old women of the streets in rundown shoes, a fifteen-year-old girl, and always, over his shoulder, the shadow conscience of his railroad engineer and hero grandfather, his parents, and the hip sanity of his closest friend, Jimmy Solomon.

Author Biography

Novelist Peter Taylor was born in northern New Brunswick on Canada's east coast where, as he tells it, he was introduced to paper at a very early age -- first, through his father who was manager of the local pulp and paper mill, and later as a delivery boy for his home town's weekly newspaper. Following high school and several years of university, Peter signed on as a news reporter with the Saint John Telegraph Journal, the province's leading daily. On the heels of that experience and after several years in the journalism faculty at Carleton University in Ottawa, Peter joined the Ottawa Citizen, one of Canada's leading daily newspapers for 12 years. It was while with the Citizen that he wrote Watcha Gonna Do Boy ... Watcha Gonna Be?, a first novel which was subsequently made into a TV movie, and later a radio drama by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Published originally by McClelland and Stewart, Canada's pre-eminent book publisher at the time, the novel, in a round-about way, lead to Peter's accepting the title of Vice President and Marketing Director for the book-publishing company later that same year.