This darkly comic novel follows the lives of a family over one increasingly desperate week. Manda, a tough, sarcastic woman, has yet to make peace with the town she was brought to as a teenager after her parents’ messy divorce. Her mother is crazy, her father ill and in retreat, her damaged older brother restless and distant, her stepbrother a grown-up teenager without any friends, and her husband a tight-lipped store-owner who presses Manda to have a baby. Full of barbed dialogue and deadpan descriptions of family dynamics and the kind of awkward social dances that get performed every day, this is a book for people who always feel a little out of place, right where they are.
NATHAN WHITLOCK has won the inaugural Emerging Artist in Creative Writing Award and the Short Prose for Developing Writers Award. He is the reviews editor of the
Quill & Quire, and has written for the
Toronto Star,
Saturday Night, the
Globe and Mail,
Maisonneuve,
Toro,
Geist, and elsewhere. He currently lives in Toronto with his wife and two children.
This darkly comic novel follows the lives of a family over one increasingly desperate week. Manda, a tough, sarcastic woman, has yet to make peace with the town she was brought to as a teenager after her parents’ messy divorce. Her mother is crazy, her father ill and in retreat, her damaged older brother restless and distant, her stepbrother a grown-up teenager without any friends, and her husband a tight-lipped store-owner who presses Manda to have a baby. Full of barbed dialogue and deadpan descriptions of family dynamics and the kind of awkward social dances that get performed every day, this is a book for people who always feel a little out of place, right where they are.
NATHAN WHITLOCK has won the inaugural Emerging Artist in Creative Writing Award and the Short Prose for Developing Writers Award. He is the reviews editor of the Quill & Quire, and has written for the Toronto Star, Saturday Night, the Globe and Mail, Maisonneuve, Toro, Geist, and elsewhere. He currently lives in Toronto with his wife and two children.
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