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Adult Onset
On sale
30th September 2014
Price: £17.99
‘Ann-Marie MacDonald captures the dark hilarity of parenthood like nobody else. I gulped down Adult Onset in a single day.’ Emma Donoghue, author of Room
A NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER IN CANADA
Mary Rose McKinnon has two children with her partner Hilary and a fractured relationship with her mother Dolly; she also has issues with anger management and lives in fear of hurting the children and these feelings seem somehow rooted in a part of her childhood she has trouble remembering.
Is Dolly – the kind of big personality who makes all Mary Rose’s friends, and even waiters in coffee shops, exclaim ‘I love your Mum!’ – really harbouring a dark secret about what caused Mary Rose’s childhood injuries, and is Mary Rose doomed to follow the same path with her own children?
ADULT ONSET is a heartbreaking, hilarious, hugely satisfying novel about family ties and the joy and agony of parenthood. Ann-Marie MacDonald gets under the reader’s skin and gives voice to the feelings we have all experienced but may never have examined.
A NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER IN CANADA
Mary Rose McKinnon has two children with her partner Hilary and a fractured relationship with her mother Dolly; she also has issues with anger management and lives in fear of hurting the children and these feelings seem somehow rooted in a part of her childhood she has trouble remembering.
Is Dolly – the kind of big personality who makes all Mary Rose’s friends, and even waiters in coffee shops, exclaim ‘I love your Mum!’ – really harbouring a dark secret about what caused Mary Rose’s childhood injuries, and is Mary Rose doomed to follow the same path with her own children?
ADULT ONSET is a heartbreaking, hilarious, hugely satisfying novel about family ties and the joy and agony of parenthood. Ann-Marie MacDonald gets under the reader’s skin and gives voice to the feelings we have all experienced but may never have examined.
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Reviews
Big, troubling and brave.
...explores the question of parental abuse and its origins with uncommon courage.
[MacDonald's] prose...is always right and true, clean and penetrating.
A lively, moving, and often funny story that has the potential to help usher in a new era of honest literary depictions of families in all their permutations.
MacDonald is a stunningly good writer . . . The Way the Crow Flies . . . secures for MacDonald a place, forever, in Canadian literature.
Sensitive and unmistakeably heartfelt
Ms. MacDonald strikes just the right tone as she exposes the brutal undercurrents of domestic life.
. . . an intricate, gripping novel that is also a master class in turning the personal into the universal through art.
A complex, troubling novel that cuts with surgical precision into the sinew and muscle of family life.
Ann-Marie MacDonald captures the dark hilarity of parenthood like nobody else. I gulped down Adult Onset in a single day.
Many of us will see ourselves in the profound discomfort MacDonald has conjured... the book is an absolute triumph of terrifying authenticity.
She has again delivered a masterpiece.
Macdonald is excellent at conversation - the phonecalls between Mary Rose and her mother are superb in their accuracy
One of the finest novels I've read in a long, long time.
. . . a novel impossible to put down once begun. . . . the novel is superb, a fine blending of fact and fiction, of remembered incident and forgotten history, a wonderfully written treatise on the power of the past to impinge on the present.
Beautifully rendered... frank and acidly funny... It's a large-hearted, resonant novel, filled with an interiority that opens out - a generous work.
Definitely recommended
Remarkable...an engrossing, disturbing and layered tale.
Suspense builds; surely, horror awaits. . . . Macdonald's book remains spellbinding throughout. It is impossible to forget.