Martine Craythorn has but one goal: to live the life of a good person, to help the "porepeople" who have obsessed her since she was a shy young girl aspiring to sainthood. When she loses her first real job, writing puff profiles for a business magazine, she seizes the moment to flee her affluent neighbourhood and move downtown.

So begins her journey down and out into the world of the marginalized. Fierce and crushingly lonely herself, Martine finds her own pain and prejudice are powerful barriers to virtue—until she meets Father Clifford Kearney, a charismatic Catholic priest who gives her a job waitressing at the Fiat Lux Refuge, a café he runs for low-income people. Martine soon discovers, however, that neither priest nor café are quite what they seem.

Set in 1987, at the height of the "greed decade," Alms is a story of compassion and redemption, and a penetrating examination of our society's troubled relationship to selflessness, told in anguished, fevered, and surprisingly funny prose.

"Darkly funny."
—Chatelaine

"Rife with lacerating insights into human nature."
—Edmonton Journal

"You don't know whether to laugh, cry, or both."
—Ottawa Sunday Sun

"Charting the same territory as Nick Hornby's How to Be Good, Alms offers a mordant antidote to anyone who has ever suffered from the irrational impulse to get out there and actually do some good."
—Robert Hough, author of The Final Confession of Mabel Stark

"Considering how many comic talents Canada has exported, it's strange that we don't have many novelists who can combine wicked, Evelyn Waugh-ish satire with deft writing. Alms achieves both with polish and ease."
—Marni Jackson, author of The Mother Zone