Most Popular Books by Lynn Coady

LONGLISTED FOR THE SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE! From the author of the Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning story collection Hellgoing--an electrifying, brooding novel about the lengths we go to care for family, and what happens when a stranger places himself at the center of one household. "Watching You Without Me is like a Lorrie Moore book suffering a Patricia Highsmith fever dream. You slide right along on Coady''s witty and endearing style, and meanwhile the trap has closed over you without your ever standing a chance." --Jonathan Lethem After her mother''s sudden death, Karen finds herself back in her childhood home in Nova Scotia for the first time in a decade, acting as full-time caregiver to her older sister, Kelli. Overwhelmed and consumed by the isolation of her new role, Karen finds a shoulder to cry on in Trevor--one of Kelli''s caregivers. Karen gratefully accepts his friendship and comes to trust him all the more when she discovers how close Trevor was to her mother, Irene. But all is not as it appears to be. What begins with friendly advice and someone to talk to soon takes a dark and mysterious turn. Who is this person Karen has let into her home and into her family''s life? How well does she know the stranger she has entrusted with her sister''s well-being? As Trevor slowly weaves himself into Karen and Kelli''s lives, Karen starts to grasp the unsettling truth about him and his relationship with her mother--and to experience for herself the true and dangerous nature of Trevor''s "care."

A piercing epistolary novel, The Antagonist explores, with wit and compassion, how the impressions of others shape, pervert, and flummox both our perceptions of ourselves and our very nature. Gordon Rankin Jr., aka “Rank,” thinks of himself as “King Midas in reverse”—and indeed misfortune seems to follow him at every turn. Against his will and his nature, he has long been considered—given his enormous size and strength—a goon and enforcer by his classmates, by his hockey coaches, and, not least, by his “tiny, angry” father. He gamely lives up to their expectations, until a vicious twist of fate forces him to flee underground. Now pushing forty, he discovers that an old, trusted friend from his college days has published a novel that borrows freely from the traumatic events of Rank’s own life. Outraged by this betrayal and feeling cruelly misrepresented, he bashes out his own version of his story in a barrage of e-mails to the novelist that range from funny to furious to heartbreaking. With The Antagonist, Lynn Coady demonstrates all of the gifts that have made her one of Canada’s most respected young writers. Here she gives us an astonishing story of sons and fathers and mothers, of the rewards and betrayals of male friendship, and a large-spirited, hilarious, and exhilarating portrait of a man tearing his life apart in order to put himself back together. This ebook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.

Winner of the 2013 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Shortlisted for the Rogers Writers'' Trust Fiction Prize. Selected as an Amazon.ca Best Book and for The Globe''s Top 10 Books of 2013. With astonishing range and depth, Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Lynn Coady gives us nine unforgettable new stories, each one of them grabbing our attention from the first line and resonating long after the last. A young nun charged with talking an anorexic out of her religious fanaticism toys with the thin distance between practicality and blasphemy. A strange bond between a teacher and a schoolgirl takes on ever deeper, and stranger, shapes as the years progress. A bride-to-be with a penchant for nocturnal bondage can’t seem to stop bashing herself up in the light of day. Equally adept at capturing the foibles and obsessions of men and of women, compassionate in her humour yet never missing an opportunity to make her characters squirm, fascinated as much by faithlessness as by faith, Lynn Coady is quite possibly the writer who best captures what it is to be human at this particular moment in our history.

"A true grit coming-of-age novel" (Seattle Post-Intelligencer), Saints of Big Harbour is a funny, brutal, and vivid story about small-town life and the inescapable power of gossip. Lynn Coady gives us the unforgettable Guy Boucher, a fatherless teenager and recluse, who finds himself at the center of an ugly rumor. Several versions of truth emerge and collide through Guy''s eyes and the stories of those who surround him -- his overbearing uncle, a girl idealized by her town, a quietly wise young woman wrestling with demons of her own, his draft-dodger English teacher, and a pair of golden boys trapped in emotional adolescence as well as Big Harbour itself.

“We look around and feel as if book culture as we know it is crumbling to dust, but there’s one important thing to keep in mind: as we know it.” What happens if we separate the idea of "the book" from the experience it has traditionally provided? Lynn Coady challenges booklovers addicted to the physical book to confront their darkest fears about the digital world and the future of reading. Is the all-pervasive internet turning readers into web-surfing automatons and books themselves into museum pieces? The bogeyman of technological change has haunted humans ever since Plato warned about the dangers of the written word, and every generation is convinced its youth will bring about the end of civilization. In Who Needs Books?, Coady suggests that, even though digital advances have long been associated with the erosion of literacy, recent technologies have not debased our culture as much as they have simply changed the way we read. Introduction by Paul Kennedy.

Earnest, small-town Lawrence Campbell is fascinated by his poetry professor, the charismatic and uncompromising Jim Arsenault. Larry is determined to escape a life of thrifty drudgery and intellectual poverty working for his parents’ motel and mini-golf business on Prince Edward Island. Jim appears to the young poet as a beacon of authenticity – mercurial, endlessly creative, fearless in his confrontations with the forces of conformity. And he drinks a lot. Jim’s magnetic personality soon draws Larry’s entire poetry composition class into his orbit. Among the other literary acolytes are Sherrie Mitten, with her ringletted blonde hair and guileless blue eyes, the turtlenecked, urbane Claude who writes villanelles, and the champion of rhyming couplets about the heroic struggles of the Maritime proletariat, Todd. Casting a huge shadow over the group is the varsity football player and recreational drug user Chuck Slaughter – titanically strong, capriciously violent, hilariously indifferent to the charms of the poetic life – who has nearly given up terrifying Larry in order to pursue an awkward romantic interest in Sherrie. Drawn by ambition and fascination, the group assembles itself fawningly around Jim, tagging along to bars, showing up at readings, thrilled to be invited to Jim’s home, a shambling farmhouse in the woods where he lives with Moira, his shrewish backwoods muse. Lost in adulation, Larry is so delighted to be singled out for Jim’s attention that he does not pause to wonder what Jim expects from his increasingly close relationship with the young poet. Closely observed and deeply funny, Mean Boy tells the story of Larry’s year-long battle against the indiscriminate use of quotation marks in advertising and his disillusionment as his narcissistic, hard-drinking idol spins out of control and threatens to take the young man’s cherished notions about art and poetry down with him. Mean Boy is Lynn Coady’s most polished and ambitious work to date. From the Hardcover edition.

A collection of short stories that explore the violence of family, the constraints of small town life and the temptation of escape. Some strong language and some descriptions of violence.

Strange Heaven is tearfully hilarious, as funny and appalling as real life. Bridget Murphy, almost eighteen, has gone to Halifax from industrial Cape Breton, had her baby, and given it up for adoption. She’s apathetic, the doctors decide, so they transfer her to the psych ward of the children’s hospital. There, she’s cooped up with five seriously disturbed teenagers and a flock of wan children. Sent home for Christmas, Bridget faces domestic uproar. Her grandmother, Margaret P., raves and prays from her bed, banging the wall with her bedpan. Bridget’s kind-hearted parents, Robert and Joan, also take care of Robert’s mentally handicapped brother, Rollie. Joan’s efforts to keep the lid on are no match for Robert’s wild profanity, Margaret’s dementia, and Rollie’s efforts to join the fray. Bridget’s boozy friends, her whining ex-boyfriend, and the family chaos make up a “strange heaven” in which her apathy starts to lift. Her vague plan to hibernate at home forever is off. Whatever she does, her drifting days are over.

Wie mein Freund mein Leben stahl

Published for Goose Lane''s diamond anniversary.

Gordon Rankin Jr., dit " Rank ", a tiré le mauvais numéro. Adolescent hagard, harcelé par des questions existentielles noyées dans l''alcool, sa carrure de gorille lui vaut d''endosser le rôle de la brute, à contrecoeur. Jusqu''à la rixe de trop... Mais quand, vingt ans après, un ancien camarade d''université publie un roman dont il est la cible, le passé lui saute à la gorge. Trahi par ce portrait menteur, Rank livre à son adversaire sa version des faits, dans une correspondance à sens unique tour à tour furieuse, hilare, déchirante. Avec une rare virtuosité, Lynn Coady fait de cette mise à nue épistolaire un jeu de miroirs troublant pour mieux passer au crible de la fiction la mythologie du moi. Subtil, irrésistible, et brillant.

If you crossed Aristophanes with Eugene Ionesco, and then mixed in a bit of tag-team wrestling, you might end up with something like Lynn Coady''s irreverent short play Mark. When a not-so-innocent question provokes an argument one Sunday afternoon, it doesn''t take long before modern-day courtesy is tossed aside and the true pagan blood sport of competitive couplehood rears its ugly head. Points are hard-won and the penalties are swift and painful--with game play this punishing, what could possibly lie in store for the loser? Or the winner for that matter? But how do you actually win this thing anyway? And what do baby seals have to do with it? Wait, what team was I on again? Skydiving, a companion piece to Mark, examines the idea of relationship from the inside out. Ash has lost her memory, and her husband Cam is trying to help her remember their life together. Looking at their life choices with fresh eyes, the couple gains a whole new perspective on marriage, personal history, and the interconnectedness of everything. Featuring game show elements and glowing quotations, Skydiving is a meditation on memory and love that is by turns hilarious and poignant.

Een zestienjarige jongen in het Canadese Nova Scotia komt in problemen als hij een meisje dat hem afwees blijft benaderen.

And now we are 60. To mark this momentous occasion, the editors at Goose Lane have selected six tiny perfect stories for your reading pleasure. Authored by some of Canada''s finest writers, they come from the sweep of Goose Lane''s publishing history. Each story will be individually bound and gathered with the others in a nifty sleeve as a collection. Or they may be purchased individually in eBook singles. Here''s what you can expect to find in this sexagenarian sextet: ALDEN NOWLAN''s "A Boy''s Life of Napoleon," a brilliant piece of short fiction adapted from Nowlan''s first novel, "The Wanton Troopers," written in 1960, but published posthumously in 1988. The beguiling "Woman Gored by Bison Lives" from DOUGLAS GLOVER''s 1991 GG-nominated story collection, "A Guide to Animal Behaviour." Giller Prize-winner LYNN COADY''s unforgettable Christmas story "The Three Marys," adapted from her award-winning debut novel, "Strange Heaven," published in 1993. Commonwealth Prize winner SHAUNA SINGH BALDWIN''s glittering story "Simran" from her 1996 debut collection, "English Lessons and Other Stories." KATHRYN KUITENBROUWER''s haunting "What Had Become of Us," from her 2003 debut book of short fiction, "Way Up." The extraordinary "Knife Party" from a new collection of stories by MARK ANTHONY JARMAN, forthcoming in the spring of 2015.

La dure réalité d''un petit village rural de la Nouvelle-Écosse au cours d''une année déterminante dans la vie d''un jeune adolescent. Un monde dans lequel chacun se débat pour sa survie et sa dignité. Deuxième roman de l''auteure, née à l''île du Cap Breton. [SDM].

Gordon Rankin Jr., dit " Rank ", a tiré le mauvais numéro. Adolescent hagard, harcelé par des questions existentielles noyées dans l''alcool, sa carrure de gorille lui vaut d''endosser le rôle de la brute, à contrecoeur. Jusqu''à la rixe de trop... Mais quand, vingt ans après, un ancien camarade d''université publie un roman dont il est la cible, le passé lui saute à la gorge. Trahi par ce portrait menteur, Rank livre à son adversaire sa version des faits, dans une correspondance à sens unique tour à tour furieuse, hilare, déchirante.