Winner, Atlantic Independent Booksellers Choice Award, Canadian Authors Association Air Canada Award, Dartmouth Book Award, and Thomas Head Raddall Award
Shortlisted, Governor General's Award for Fiction

She's depressed, they say. Apathetic. Bridget Murphy, almost eighteen, has had it with her zany family. When she is transferred to the psych ward after giving birth and putting her baby up for adoption, it is a welcome relief — even with the manic ranting of a teen stripper and come-ons of another delusional inmate.

But this oasis of relative calm is short-lived. Christmas is coming, and Uncle Albert arrives to whisk her back to the bedlam of home and the booze-soaked social life that got her into trouble in the first place. Her grandmother raves from her bed, banging the wall with a bedpan through a litany of profanities. Her father curses while her mother tries to keep the lid on developmentally delayed Uncle Rollie. The baby's father wants to sue her, and her friends don't get that she's changed.

Lynn Coady is a novelist and essayist whose fiction has been garnering acclaim since her first novel, Strange Heaven, was published and subsequently nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction when she was twenty-eight. Her short story collection Hellgoing won the 2013 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada’s most prestigious literary award, for which her novel The Antagonist was also nominated in 2011. Her books have been published in the UK, US, Holland, France, and Germany. Coady has been a journalist, magazine editor, and advice columnist, and is currently writing for television. She divides her time between Edmonton and Toronto. Follow her on Twitter @Lynn_Coady.

Lynn Coady's profile page

Marina Endicott’s second novel, Good to a Fault, was winner of the regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award, Canada and the Caribbean, a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and one of The Globe and Mail’s Top 100 Books of 2008. Her debut novel, Open Arms, was a finalist for the 2001 Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award and broadcast on CBC Radio’s Between the Covers. Endicott’s stories have been featured in Coming Attractions and shortlisted for the Journey Prize and the Western Magazine Awards. She was born in Golden, BC and grew up in Vancouver, Nova Scotia and Toronto. She has been an actor, director, playwright and editor, and was Dramaturge of the Saskatchewan Playwrights Centre for many years. She lives in Edmonton.

Marina Endicott's profile page

• Winner, Dartmouth Book Award (Fiction)
• Short-listed, Governor General's Award for Fiction
• Winner, Canadian Authors Association Air Canada Award
• Winner, Thomas Head Raddall Award
• Winner, Atlantic Independent Booksellers' Choice Award
• Winner, Canadian Authors' Association Air Canada Award
• Winner, Atlantic Independent Booksellers Choice Award

"Cape Breton humour at its blackest, most profane and politically incorrect best."

<i>Chronicle Herald</i>

"Lynn Coady is out to bust the stereotype; she writes about her home with irreverence, ambivalence, and a lot of humour."

<i>Quill & Quire</i>

"Her work is among the most noteworthy in the country."

<i>National Post</i>

"A stellar first novel ... both nightmarish and laugh-out-loud funny."

<i>Quill & Quire</i>

"An exciting debut ... rivalling Roddy Doyle's black comedies of Dublin life."

Amazon.ca