In All the Lonely Years, William Andrews takes us to the other side of the tracks and the lives of ne'er-do-wells who were dealt a poor hand of cards in childhood and struggle desperately to reshuffle their fate. From a Prince Edward Island orphanage and a farm during the Depression, we follow Dare and Joe, two hard-luck and self-sabotaging men, to barroom brawls and Island jails, the Dieppe Raid, the post-war Halifax waterfront, the "big house" in New Brunswick, and back to PEI and its bootleggers, boarding houses, potato farms, snobbish and open-armed churches, and sanctuaries of Island fields and woods. Andrews knows his people inside and out. We hear and believe their voices and thoughts—anger, guilt, and despair, tenderness and sorrow, gratitude to Good Samaritans, fear of dying desolate in an alley, and yearning for salvation—as if those voices were our "there-but-for-fortune" own. Andrews' prose moves with the crafty footwork and knock-out punches of a gifted prize fighter. This is the other "Island way of life" brought to the fore—split open, lamented, honoured, redeemed by a writer whose language and vision are earthy as fresh-plowed soil, deeply-hued as a field of lupin.

William Andrews was born and raised during the forties and fifties on a mixed farm in Freetown, PEI. He left home young, shifted around a lot and tried a lot of things. He marched in regular peace time army, fished gill net on Lake Erie, sang gospel in Maritime penal institutions, carved wood in Japan and did a lot of labour type jobs in a lot of places. He was encouraged to write while at UPEI in 1970–71. He started writing in 1995. His first novel The Grand Change was chosen as one of Prince Edward Island's Library Fourteen Books, One Island reading campaign.

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