But his home town doesn't understand him, the girl he loved has left, and his overbearing mother chews over his shortcomings with her Hungryman's portions of barbequed beef at Webster's Steakhouse. So Hughie does what any Johnny Lonely would do; he takes off to find his estranged brother and chase the American Dream.

Winner of the 2006 Tonto Press New Novelist contest

A New Writing North Fresh Fiction Festival Pick

Pete Tanton grew up in the southern US, but now lives and works in the UK. He has worked as a travelling violin salesman and as a publisher's stockroom assistant, and now teaches English at a secondary school in Gateshead. He lives in Newcastle upon Tyne with his wife and son.

Johnny Lonely by Pete Tanton is the winning novel in the first Tonto Press New Novelist writing initiative, and was selected from hundreds of submissions as the manuscript with the most potential for development.

'Atmospheric, believable, much more than just a good read. If you're young you will revel in it. If youth has flown, this is the book to revive it. Whatever your age, you'll love it.'
Denise Robertson MBE, novelist and agony aunt

'Reading Johnny Lonely is funnier than watching a drunk falling over and more poignant than realizing that you're dead. Pete Tanton has a rare talent for making the weird totally credible and the realistic strangely surreal. Johnny Lonely is crammed with perfectly acute observations on American society, of a kind that only an exile could achieve.'
Jonathan Trigell, author Boy A and Cham

Pete Tanton’s short story, Come Walk with Me On The Wild Side, Sweet Jesus, was published by Tonto Press in the Tonto Short Stories anthology in 2006.