Ruby Red

Ruby Red is an unflinching coming-of-age novel with a surprisingly tender core.

It’s 2004, and high-school senior Daniel has just been expelled from his boarding school and moved in with his mother and her boyfriend in Toronto. Friendless, ashamed of his looks, and plagued by an inescapable longing for touch, Daniel develops a fascination with Ruby Red, the exotic massage parlour he passes on his way to his new public school. Aided by online forums, Daniel grows increasingly obsessed with the parlour’s troubled matriarch, a woman known as April A. With his life spiraling around Ruby Red, he’s driven to ever-more dangerous acts, testing how far he will go in pursuit of love.
Ruby Red is at once a portrait of a loner, a bleakly humorous depiction of millennial adolescence, and an exploration of some of our most pressing cultural issues—para-sociality, alienation, sex work, and the conflicts of desire.

“Ruby Red is like a highlight reel of every acne-scarred thought and inflamed teenage feeling you (or, fine, I) ever had. Like no other writer, Michael LaPointe captures something I think of as Universal Boyhood—grody, tacky, downtrodden and, from a distance of many years, unbelievably funny. This book will fill you with nostalgia for adolescence, and gratitude for having escaped it.” -Tony Tulathimutte, author of Rejection

“A coming-of-age-story like no other I’ve ever read, Michael LaPointe’s Ruby Red is tautly written, suspenseful and as original and unsentimental as it is ultimately touching. I loved it.” –Adelle Waldman