Best Seller

Good Guys

Name: Good Guys
Price: 13.99 USD
Availability: PreOrder
Author: Sharon Bala
ISBN: 9780771099083

Ebook

Available on Jan 20, 2026 | 336 Pages

Preorder from:

Available on Jan 20, 2026 | 336 Pages

Preorder from:

From the bestselling author of The Boat People comes a page-turning moral drama about money, the dark side of philanthropy, and what happens when you try to change the world for all the wrong reasons.

“The easiest choices are the ones you make for other people.”

Claire Talbot is the publicist at Children of the World, an international aid charity. Morally burnt out after decades working in reputation management, Claire is relieved to finally use her PR skills for good. Too bad the organization is on the verge of bankruptcy. In a last-ditch effort to keep them afloat, Claire arranges for an A-list actress to volunteer at one of their overseas orphanages. When the actress decides to adopt a baby and promises a massive donation, it seems as if Claire has single-handedly saved the day. But after a journalist digs into their operations and reveals a shocking crime, Claire and her colleagues must reckon with their complicity and all the ways their work abroad has harmed the very people they set out to save.

Moving between Children of the World’s headquarters in Toronto and their compound in Central America, Good Guys charts the charity’s rise and fall. Scathing yet compassionate, the novel is a thought-provoking exploration of power, philanthropy, and the lengths we go to for redemption. Emotionally engrossing, tightly paced, and sharply observed, it ultimately asks: Is it possible to do good in an imperfect world?

“In Good Guys, Sharon Bala takes on the world of charity with kaleidoscopic elegance, turning the crystalline glass of her prose again and again to show us a system both gorgeous and fractured. Bala writes heartbreakingly about those seeking help however they can and the shifting motivations of those attempting to provide it. If you care about others, you will love these pages and what they ask of you: to think about what goodness is, what shape it takes, how it aligns with power, and to whom it belongs. This book is relentlessly original, and also an old-fashioned page turner that will have your heart in your throat.”
—V. V. Ganeshananthan, author of Brotherless Night

“Good Guys is astounding. The satire is so nuanced and artfully done that one can’t help but feel empathy in spite of oneself. I was riveted by the story, by the characters, even as I despised some of them. This thoughtful, emotionally compelling novel is necessary in a world of binary thinking and performative gestures.”
—Jenny Heijun Wills, author of Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related.

“Bala’s blackly comic tale rotates through a kaleidoscopic cast of narrators, each of whom believes themselves to be the hero in their own story. With a satirical eye that never tips into cynicism, Bala delivers a quietly profound, thriller-adjacent dissection of global inequality that bruises even as it entertains.”
—Publishers Weekly

Author

Sharon Bala

Sharon Bala’s bestselling debut novel, The Boat People, won the 2020 Newfoundland & Labrador Book Award and the 2019 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction. It was a finalist for Canada Reads 2018, the 2018 Amazon Canada First Novel Award, the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award, the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, and was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. The Boat People is on sale worldwide with translations in French, German, Arabic, and Turkish. The unpublished manuscript won the Percy Janes First Novel Award and was shortlisted for the NLCU Fresh Fish Award for Emerging Writers. In 2017 Sharon won the Writers’ Trust/ McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize for her short story “Butter Tea at Starbucks” and had a second story on the long-list. Her short fiction has also won three Newfoundland and Labrador Arts & Letters Awards and been published in: The Journey Prize 29, Hazlitt, Grain, PRISM international, The Dalhousie Review, The New Quarterly, Maisonneuve, The Newfoundland Quarterly Online, Room, and Riddle Fence. Sharon was given the 2017 CBC Emerging Artist Award. She is a member of The Port Authority, a St. John’s writing group. In 2015, they published a short story collection called Racket with Breakwater Books. Visit her online at: sharonbala.com.

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Good Guys

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By Sharon Bala