“Penny Pennington” by Fabien Roy

John is an accountant. He’s on his way home in Montreal, and it hasn’t been a good day. Someone else got the promotion at work – the someone he helped on a project. The promotion should have gone to John. And it’s crazy-busy tax season: his weekend will be occupied by client files.

Worse, it’s raining, and he has no umbrella. He gets soaked as he exits the bus. He finally takes his shoes and socks off, walking barefoot in the rain. He sees a penny – an American penny – lying on the sidewalk. He picks it up and pockets it, not giving it another thought. 

He arrives home to find his wife preparing to leave for a weekend with his aunt – the aunt who always make him feel inadequate. Even though he has to work the entire weekend, he wants his wife at home. She leaves anyway. He senses they’re having problems, even if she says they’re not. She wants children, and he wants to delay them, for vague reasons.

He tries to get at the mountain of work. And then he hears the voice. It’s coming from the penny. And the conversation will change John’s life.

Penny Pennington: A Lincoln Head in Montreal is a novel by Fabien Roy. You start a book like this, and you at first think it is really weird. A story about a guy talking with a penny and it’s not horror, fantasy, or any genre other than contemporary fiction. And then you don’t care what the genre is, because you get sucked right into John’s story. 

Fabien Roy

Roy received a B.A. degree from McGill University. He’s been a painter, actor, waiter, teacher, father and writer. He is also the author of Buckyball, a novel that sounds about as odd and is likely every bit as good as Penny Pennington. He lives in Canada.

Don’t be put off by the strangeness of a story about a man talking to a penny. The penny eventually transforms itself into a young man, which takes some of the pressure off the conversation. And while Penny Pennington does provide a view of the world from a penny’s perspective, you also discover a story about how a man goes about making sense of his life.

With the help of a penny.