Globe & Mail bestselling Lesley Crewe's new novel brings readers to 1960s Montreal & features a nosy would-be child detective searching for the truth about her mother.
It's 1967 in Montreal, the Expo is in full swing, and Audrey Parker has just moved with her dad to Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, a whole new neighbourhood full of different kinds of people to spy on. Audrey is a lot of things: articulate, disarming, forthright. And, as her father reminds her often, indecently nosy.
Audrey scribbles every observation down in her notebooks — from which foods her new teacher eats for lunch, to how blue the water is in Greece, to what time the one-legged man across the street gets home. She is certain she will soon root out a murderer or uncover a mystery. But there's only one mystery that really matters to her: her mother. Who was she? How did she die? Why won't her father ever talk about her?
Over a year of Audrey's life, we bike with her through the streets of NDG, encountering stray animals, free-range kids, and adults both viciously cruel and wonderful. And we walk with Audrey across the threshold from childhood to adolescence, where she will discover the truth about her mother.
Balancing humour and sadness as expertly as ever, author Lesley Crewe — who has so often captured Cape Breton perfectly on the page — turns her incisive observations for the first time to the NDG of the 1960s, where she grew up.

Lesley Crewe is the Globe and Mail – bestselling author of thirteen novels, including Nosy Parker, which was named one of Indigo's Top 100 Books of 2022, The Spoon Stealer, longlisted for Canada Reads 2022, Beholden, Mary, Mary, Amazing Grace, Kin, and Relative Happiness, which was adapted into an award-winning feature film. She has also published two collections of essays, the Leacock — longlisted Are You Kidding Me?! and I Kid You Not! Lesley lives in Homeville, Nova Scotia. Visit her at lesleycrewe.com.

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