In these fluidly interwoven stories, Linda Svendsen charts—with tenderness and devastating accuracy—the longings, pleasures, and terrors of belonging to a family. Through the watchful and sometimes astonished eyes of Adele Nordstrom, we view the members of her chaotic, working-class home in Vancouver: her womanizing brother, Ray; her self-destructive sister, Joyce; and her mother, June, a cocktail pianist who believes that a bad marriage is better than no marriage at all.

Svendsen’s book paints a tender, piercing portrait of a girl growing up—capturing with perfect clarity the intensity of love, hate, and pain in a contemporary family. A major motion picture based on Marine Life, directed by the award-winning Anne Wheeler and starring Cybill Shepherd, was released in 2000.

Linda Svendsen’s stories have appeared in many short story anthologies and magazines such as Saturday Night and The Atlantic. She has been cited three times for Distinguished Short Story in Best American Stories and has appeared three times in Best Canadian Stories. An award-winning screenwriter, she has adapted The Sue Rodriguez Story and Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners for television. She is an associate professor in the Creative Writing Program at UBC and lives with her partner, Brian McKeown, and their family in Vancouver.

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