Malaysia-based online bookstore - 15 million titles - quick local delivery with tracking number
LONGLISTED FOR CANADA READS 2025
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 ATWOOD GIBSON WRITERS' TRUST PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 GILLER PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 DAYNE OGILVIE PRIZE FOR LGBTQ2S+ EMERGING WRITERS
STARRED REVIEWS IN KIRKUS, BOOKLIST AND QUILL & QUIRE
A heartbreaking tale of a family and an impossible love, torn apart by secrets and traditions in late-twentieth-century Cairo.
As a boy in 1960s Cairo, Tarek knows that his entire life is written in advance. He'll be a doctor like his father, marry, and have children. Under the watchful eyes of his mother and his sister, he starts to do just that - until Ali enters his life and turns it upside down. The two men, from very different worlds, embark on an unsayable relationship that threatens to tear apart Tarek's family.
Years later, as Tarek is living a solitary life in Montreal, someone starts writing about him and to him, piecing together a past he wants only to forget. But who is the writer of this tale? And will he figure it out in time?
A bestseller in its original Quebec edition, and the recipient of several awards, including the Prix Femina des Lycéens, What I Know About You is poised to be an international sensation.
This novel is a searing love story that moves between Egypt and Montréal, that shifts between hearts, highlighting the sacrifices the characters feel they have to make for the ones they love. Romantic, surprising, mesmerizing, and so devastating, What I Know About You examines the terrible costs of family secrets and toxic shame. - Suzette Mayr, author of The Sleeping Car Porter
A CBC BOOKS BEST NONFICTION OF 2020
AN ENTROPY MAGAZINE BEST NONFICTION 2020/21
A NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY BOOK OF THE DAY (07/23/2022)
Fairy tales shape how we see the world, so what happens when you identify more with the Beast than Beauty?
If every disabled character is mocked and mistreated, how does the Beast ever imagine a happily-ever-after? Amanda Leduc looks at fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm to Disney, showing us how they influence our expectations and behaviour and linking the quest for disability rights to new kinds of stories that celebrate difference.
Historically we have associated the disabled body image and disabled life with an unhappy ending - Sue Carter, Toronto Star
Leduc persuasively illustrates the power of stories to affect reality in this painstakingly researched and provocative study that invites us to consider our favorite folktales from another angle. - Sara Shreve, Library Journal
She [Leduc] argues that template is how society continues to treat the disabled: rather than making the world accessible for everyone, the disabled are often asked to adapt to inaccessible environments. - Ryan Porter, Quill & Quire
Read this smart, tenacious book. - The Washington Post
A brilliant young critic named Amanda Leduc explores this pernicious power of language in her new book, Disfigured ... Leduc follows the bread crumbs back into her original experience with fairy tales - and then explores their residual effects ... Read this smart, tenacious book. - The Washington Post
Leduc investigates the intersection between disability and her beloved fairy tales, questioning the constructs of these stories and where her place is, as a disabled woman, among those narratives. - The Globe and Mail
It gave me goosebumps as I read, to see so many of my unexpressed, half-formed thoughts in print. My highlighter got a good workout. - BookRiot
Disfigured is not just an eye-opener when it comes to the Disney princess crew and the Marvel universe - this thin volume provides the tools to change how readers engage with other kinds of popular media, from horror films to fashion magazines to outdated sitcom jokes. - Quill & Quire
It's an essential read for anyone who loves fairy tales. - Buzzfeed Books
Leduc makes one thing clear and beautifully so - fairy tales are fundamentally fantastic, but that doesn't mean that they are beyond reproach in their depiction of real issues and identities. - Shrapnel Magazine
As Leduc takes us through these fairy tales and the space they occupy in the narratives that we construct, she slowly unfolds a call-to-action: the claiming of space for disability in storytelling. - The Globe and Mail
A provocative beginning to a thoughtful and wide-ranging book, one which explores some of the most primal stories readers have encountered and prompts them to ponder the subtext situated there all along. - LitHub
a poignant and informative account of how the stories we tell shape our collective understanding of one another. - BookMarks
What happens when we allow disabled writers to tell stories of disability within fairytales and in magical and supernatural settings? It is a reimagining of the fairytale canon we need. Leduc dares to dream of a world that most stories envision is unattainable. - Bitch Media
A free-wheeling philosophical essay, Hypochondria is expansive in its range of references, from the writings of Franz Kafka to original yet accessible readings of theorists like Lauren Berlant. Whether he is discussing Seinfeld, John Donne, or his own hypochondriac past, Rees reveals himself to be a wry and perceptive critic, exploration the causes - and the costs - of our desire for certainty. With wit and erudition, Hypochondria demonstrates both the rewards and the perils of reading (too) closely the common but typically overlooked aspects of our everyday lives.
From one of Sweden's most loved authors, an essayistic memoir about women and food, translated by Saskia Vogel.
Bread and Milk traces a life through food, from a bag of tangerines devoured in one sitting to the luxury of a grandmother's rice pudding, from pancakes meant to make up for a mother's absence to perfectly sliced tomatoes winning, at last, a distant father's approval; it explores how food can fill an emptiness but also consume you. After all, what we eat is inexorably intertwined with how we love.
In this radiant memoir, one of Sweden's most acclaimed writers considers the complex relationships between the women in her family as they struggle with financial and emotional vulnerability, and how those relationships replicate themselves in fraught and obsessive relationships with food. Bread and Milk is at once wholly original and a natural extension of the brazenly intelligent and personal writing that has come to define Karolina Ramqvist's authorship.
'If Annie Ernaux and Marcel Proust had a love child it would be Bread and Milk by Karolina Ramqvist.' - Laurel Kane, White Whale Bookstore
'Karolina Ramqvist's writing is straight-talking scripture, a spiritual text in memoir form. Food isn't just love or its opposite; food marks time for the mortal body. Food is how people remember the people who no longer exist to make and eat food. Ramqvist's mind is transgressively pragmatic, and a constant source of enlightenment. Instead of saying, 'Look at what you didn't know, her book says, Look at what you thought you didn't know, but always did.' - Heidi Julavits, author of Directions to Myself
'Swedish novelist Ramqvist's highly relatable memoir details the problems that can arise when a child associates food with love...The term food memoir doesn't quite encompass her profound autobiographical journey...her story, with its lush and evocative prose, will speak to many readers.' - Booklist
ONE OF BOOK RIOT'S 20 MUST-READ HORROR BOOKS YOU'VE NEVER HEARD OF
Simon and Marie can't seem to have a baby. And so they flee the city for an idyllic village, where things will certainly be better. But the town is gloomy, even hostile -- things haven't been the same since the factory closed down and a broadcast antenna was erected. Now there are no birds singing, and people have started disappearing.
FINALIST FOR THE CERCADOR PRIZE FOR LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION
WINNER OF A 2023 PEN TRANSLATES AWARD
This punk-like blend of Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives and Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream heralds an exciting new voice in international fiction.
Munir, G, Ernesto, and Álex leave Madrid after graduation for a carefree summer of picking grapes in the south of France. But there's no grape harvest, and they end up in a series of increasingly nightmarish factory-farming gigs, where workers start disappearing. Soon the youngmen find themselves far away from the world of books and ideas, immersed in an existence that is lawless, inhumane and increasingly menacing...
Startling, compulsive, and vibrant; Living Things reads like an ignition. The most honest thing I've read in a long time about being young and alive in a beautiful, horrible world. - Dizz Tate, author of Brutes
Living Things dips blithely in and out of genres and packs more ideas in its lean frame than seems possible. It's a novel posing as a journal posing as a meditation on the function of the journal that playfully interrogates form and content in art, what it means to write, and what it means to care or not care about anything, or about everything. Munir Hachemi is a magician, and his marvellous book, deftly translated by Julia Sanches, defies adequate description. - James Greer, author of Bad Eminence
Gorgeously labyrinthine. - Molly McGhee, author of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind
Winner of Canada Reads 2017
Winner of the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize
Finalist for the 2015 Toronto Book Awards
Winner of the 2015 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize
[Alexis] devises an inventive romp through the nature of humanity in this beautiful, entertaining read ... A clever exploration of our essence, communication, and how our societies are organized. - Kirkus Reviews
This might be the best set-up of the spring. - The Globe & Mail
-- I wonder, said Hermes, what it would be like if animals had human intelligence.
-- I'll wager a year's servitude, answered Apollo, that animals - any animal you like - would be even more unhappy than humans are, if they were given human intelligence.
And so it begins: a bet between the gods Hermes and Apollo leads them to grant human consciousness and language to a group of dogs overnighting at a Toronto vet-erinary clinic. Suddenly capable of more complex thought, the pack is torn between those who resist the new ways of thinking, preferring the old 'dog' ways, and those who embrace the change. The gods watch from above as the dogs venture into their newly unfamiliar world, as they become divided among themselves, as each struggles with new thoughts and feelings. Wily Benjy moves from home to home, Prince becomes a poet, and Majnoun forges a relationship with a kind couple that stops even the Fates in their tracks.
André Alexis's contemporary take on the apologue offers an utterly compelling and affecting look at the beauty and perils of human consciousness. By turns meditative and devastating, charming and strange, Fifteen Dogs shows you can teach an old genre new tricks.
André Alexis was born in Trinidad and grew up in Canada. His debut novel, Childhood, won the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Trillium Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. His other previous books include Asylum, Beauty and Sadness, Ingrid & the Wolf and, most recently, Pastoral, which was also nominated for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and was named a Globe and Mail Top 100 book of 2014.
Our narrator and his accidental companion, K. Sohail, find themselves on an island wellness retreat impersonating the Dhaliwals, who have probably been killed in a helicopter crash. After being welcomed by Jerome the robot, the intrepid imposters eagerly partake of the all-you-stomach buffet, the motivational speechifyings of self-help guru Brad Beard, and Professor Sayer's uncomfortably erotic couples counselling.
But things quickly take an ominous turn when an excursion to a nearby deserted village reveals a guillotine and a haunted chapel. And then one of the retreaters is murdered and the real Dhaliwals show up. Accusations, counter-accusations, and counter-counter-accusations are made, until the whole retreat is caught up in a bizarre trial.
In All You Can Kill, Pasha Malla, with his inimitable absurdist style, collides horror and humour into an utterly unforgettable satire.
Smart, hilarious, original, All You Can Kill is a feverish, one-of-a-kind, unhinged journey into the absurd shams of modern life. No one writes satire, or anything else, like Pasha Malla. - Iain Reid, author of We Spread
Malla is a fabulously gifted writer. - Publishers Weekly
I don't really know how Malla gets away with what he does ... but it is astounding to watch him do it. - The Rumpus
CBC BOOKS 'CANADIAN POETRY COLLECTIONS TO WATCH FOR IN 2024'
CBC BOOKS 'BOOKS TO READ IN HONOUR OF THE NATIONAL DAY FOR TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION'
The Sky Woman has returned to bring down the patriarchy!
This book is about a poet who may or may not be going crazy, who is just trying to survive in Winnipeg, where Indigenous people, especially women, are being disappeared. She is talking to a crow who may or may not be a trickster, and who brings a very important message: Sky Woman has returned, and she is ready to take down the patriarchy.
This is poetry, prose and dialogue about the rise and return of the matriarch. It's a call to resistance, a manifesto to the female self.
Cree poet and broadcaster Rosanna Deerchild is an important voice for our time. Her poems - angry, funny, sad - demand a new world for Indigenous women.
FEATURED ON MICHELLE OBAMA'S INSTAGRAM
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD
WINNER OF THE 2022 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE
WINNER OF THE CITY OF CALGARY W.O. MITCHELL BOOK PRIZE
WINNER OF THE 2023 GEORGES BUGNET AWARD FOR FICTION
FINALIST FOR THE 2023 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD FOR ENGLISH-LANGUAGE FICTION
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY TOP 20 LITERARY FICTION BOOKS OF 2022
OPRAH DAILY: BOOKS TO READ BY THE FIRE
THE GLOBE 100: THE BEST BOOKS OF 2022
CBC BOOKS: THE BEST CANADIAN FICTION OF 2022
SHORTLISTED FOR THE CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE FOR FICTION
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 REPUBLIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS PRIZE
When a mudslide strands a train, Baxter, a queer Black sleeping car porter, must contend with the perils of white passengers, ghosts, and his secret love affair
The Sleeping Car Porter brings to life an important part of Black history in North America, from the perspective of a queer man living in a culture that renders him invisible in two ways. Affecting, imaginative, and visceral enough that you'll feel the rocking of the train, The Sleeping Car Porter is a stunning accomplishment.
Baxter's name isn't George. But it's 1929, and Baxter is lucky enough, as a Black man, to have a job as a sleeping car porter on a train that crisscrosses the country. So when the passengers call him George, he has to just smile and nod and act invisible. What he really wants is to go to dentistry school, but he'll have to save up a lot of nickel and dime tips to get there, so he puts up with George.
On this particular trip out west, the passengers are more unruly than usual, especially when the train is stalled for two extra days; their secrets start to leak out and blur with the sleep-deprivation hallucinations Baxter is having. When he finds a naughty postcard of two queer men, Baxter's memories and longings are reawakened; keeping it puts his job in peril, but he can't part with the postcard or his thoughts of Edwin Drew, Porter Instructor.
Suzette Mayr's The Sleeping Car Porter offers a richly detailed account of a particular occupation and time--train porter on a Canadian passenger train in 1929--and unforcedly allows it to illuminate the societal strictures imposed on black men at the time--and today. Baxter is a secretly-queer and sleep-deprived porter saving up for dental school, working a system that periodically assigns unexplained demerits, and once a certain threshold is reached, the porter loses his job. Thus, success is impossible, the best one can do is to fail slowly. As Baxter takes a cross-continental run, the boarding passengers have more secrets than an Agatha Christie cast, creating a powder keg on train tracks. The Sleeping Car Porter is an engaging and illuminating novel about the costs of work, service, and secrets. - Keith Mosman, Powell's Books
I thought The Sleeping Car Porter was fantastic! It strikes a balance between being about the struggles of being black and gay at that time while not being too heavy handed with it. I enjoyed his constant mental math on how many demerits he might receive for each infraction. The reader really gets a sense of the conflict that Baxter is going through. I really liked reading a book from the perspective of a porter. - Hunter Gillum, Beaverdale Books
From the author of Paper Houses, this is the improbable, almost miraculous, story of the birth of a book years after the death of its author. In these sensitive and luminous pages, Dominique Fortier explores, through Dickinson's poetry, the mysterious power that books have over our lives, and the fragile and necessary character of literature.
CBC BOOKS: 2024 SPRING FICTION PREVIEW
A queer writer travelling through India can't escape the regrets of his past, nor the impending ruin of his present.
I am leaving for the winter - I have to get away from this small town and all its dangers - to write, read, think, all the most important things in the world but which are thought the least important, the most expendable.
Thus begins the Indian winter of our narrator, a queer writer and translator much like the author, a winter that includes a meandering journey through India, trying to write about a long-ago lover whose death he has just learned of. While on this journey into memory, he flees his current faltering relationship in search of new friendships and intimacies. Inspired by Antonio Tabucchi's Indian Nocturne, and by the writings of Anaïs Nin, Rachel Cusk, and Carole Maso, among others, Indian Winter finds itself where the travel diary, the künstlerroman, poetry, and autofiction meet. But the heartbreak brought on by his unravelling relationship and his family's inability to accept his queerness cannot be outrun; as he traverses India, our narrator can't help but repeatedly encounter himself and the range of love and alienation he has within.
Can messiness make our cities more livable, lively, and inclusive?
Crowded streets, sidewalk vendors, jumbled architecture, constant clamour, graffitied walls, parks gone wild: are these signs of a poorly managed city or indicators of urban vitality?
Messy Cities: Why We Can't Plan Everything argues that spontaneity and urban work-around are not liabilities but essential elements in all thriving cities. Forty essays by a range of writers from around the world illuminate the role of messy urbanism in enabling creativity, enterprise, and grassroots initiatives to flourish within dense modern cities.
With pieces on guerrilla beaches, desire lines, urban interruptions, and the inner lives of unlovely buildings written by experts from all walks of life, Messy Cities makes the case for embracing disorder while not shying away from confronting its challenges.
The debut novel by acclaimed poet Lisa Robertson, in which a poet realizes she's written the works of Baudelaire.
One morning, Hazel Brown awakes in a badly decorated hotel room to find that she's written the complete works of Charles Baudelaire. In her bemusement the hotel becomes every cheap room she ever stayed in during her youthful perambulations in 1980s Paris. This is the legend of a she-dandy's life.
Part magical realism, part feminist ars poetica, part history of tailoring, part bibliophilic anthem, part love affair with nineteenth-century painting, The Baudelaire Fractal is poet and art writer Lisa Robertson's first novel.
Robertson, with feminist wit, a dash of kink, and a generous brain, has written an urtext that tenders there can be, in fact, or in fiction, no such thing. Hers is a boon for readers and writers, now and in the future.--Jennifer Krasinski, Bookforum
It's brilliant, strange, and unlike anything I've read before.--Rebecca Hussey, BOOKRIOT
A stolen sign, 'No Jews Live Here, ' kept John Lorinc's Hungarian Jewish family alive during the Holocaust.
From pre-war Budapest to post-war Toronto, journalist John Lorinc unspools four generations of his Hungarian Jewish family's journey through the Holocaust, the 1956 Revolution, and finally exodus from a country that can't rid itself of its antisemitic demons.
This braided saga centers on the writer's eccentric and defiant grandmother, a consummate survivor who, with her love of flashy jewelry and her vicious tongue, was best appreciated from afar. Lorinc also traces the stories of both his grandfathers and his father, all of whom fell victim, in different ways, to the Nazis' genocidal campaign to rid Europe of Jews.
This is a deeply reported but profoundly human telling of a vile part of history, told through Lorinc's distinctively astute and compassionate consideration of how cities and cultures work. Set against the complicated and poorly understood background of Hungary's Jewish community, No Jews Live Here is about family stories, and how the narratives of our lives are shaped by our times and historical forces over which we have no control.
John Lorinc weaves Hungarian history with the equally fascinating history of his own family to tell a deeply researched story with universal resonance: how events, enormous and seemingly tiny (a genocidal war, foggy skies), conspire to create outcomes with life-and-death implications through generations. - Marsha Lederman, author of Kiss the Red Stairs: The Holocaust, Once Removed
A phenomenology of the mall: If the mall makes us feel bad, why do we keep going back? In a world poisoned by capitalism, is shopping what makes life worth living?
Kate Black grew up in West Edmonton Mall - a mall on steroids, notorious for its indoor waterpark, deadly roller coaster, and controversial dolphin shows. But everyone has a favourite mall, or a mall that is their own personal memory palace. It's a place people love to hate and hate to love - a site of pleasure and pain, of death and violence, of (sub)urban legend.
Blending a history of shopping with a story of coming of age in North America's largest and strangest mall, Big Mall investigates how these structures have become the ultimate symbol of late-capitalist dread - and, surprisingly, a subversive site of hope.
Speaking as a child of PacSun and Hot Topic myself, Big Mall is like a madeleine dipped in Orange Julius. Like a mall, the book itself has a lot of everything, a sublime mix of memoir, history, and cultural criticism. Kate Black is a learned Virgil in the consumerist Inferno, always avoiding the obvious and leading us to surprising connections--oil, suicide, Reddit, squatters, dolphins. Whether malls fill you with nostalgia or horror, this book will change your relationship to the world we've constructed around us. - Tony Tulathimutte, author of Private Citizens
Before there was Instagram, there was the mall. But what happens when a seasonless, tacky, fantasyland is all you knew growing up? How does one embrace a genuinely fake experience? Or to be more precise, a fake but genuine experience? Kate Black's Big Mall is a smart, sentimental, and perspective-shifting look at the outsized role that big malls play in modern life. Love 'em or hate 'em, one thing's for sure: after reading this book, you'll never look at a mall in the same way again. - Ziya Tong, Science broadcaster & author of The Reality Bubble
A sardonic, feminist reimagining of the story of Mary Toft, infamous rabbit-birthing hoaxer.
Mary Toft was just another eighteenth-century woman living in poverty, misery, and frequent pain. The kind of person overlooked by those with power, forgotten by historians. Mary Toft was nothing. Until, that is, Mary Toft started giving birth to rabbits...Sensational debut novelist Noémi Kiss-Deáki reimagines Mary's strange and fascinating story - and how she found fame when a large swath of England became convinced that she was the mother of rabbits.
Mary and the Rabbit Dream is a story of bodily autonomy, of absurdity, of the horrors inflicted on women, of the cruel realities of poverty, and the grotesque divides between rich and poor. A story told with exquisite wit, skill, and a beautiful streak of subversive mischief.
Noémi Kiss-Deáki's style is astonishing - hypnotic, poetic, persistent, wild, blazing and marvellous. As the novel unfolds you simply can't believe what is happening - it's outrageous, it's cruel, it's unfathomable and yet - it's the way of the world. Here is Mary Toft's tale, retold in dazzling prose that is both exquisite and furious. Noémi reimagines the possibilities for historical fiction and Mary and the Rabbit Dream is utterly original and utterly brilliant. - Victoria MacKenzie, author of For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain
One of those novels that seemingly arrives from nowhere, fully formed, as odd, disturbing, and lingering as the most vivid of fever dreams. To create something so playfully provocative, subversive and gripping displays a rare literary talent. I've never read anything like it. - Benjamin Myers, author of The Gallows Pole
In Mary and the Rabbit Dream, Noémi Kiss-Deáki transforms the tale of Mary Toft into a stinging, witty critique of the oppressions heaped upon the bodies of impoverished women. This is a brave debut, one told with courage and wit, one which dissects a ruthless system of class and gender - and lays bare the concentric circles of power that still govern our world. - Selby Wynn Schwartz, author of After Sappho
I loved Mary and the Rabbit Dream - a sprightly but savage tale that re-imagines the real-life case of Mary Toft, who, in 1726, supposedly started giving birth to rabbits ... It's a supple, smartly self-conscious and ingenious take on the historical novel. - Lucy Scholes, editor of A Different Sound: Stories by Mid-Century Women Writers
A tense, nightmarish book about power and incarnation. ... Stylish, visceral, incandescent. - Clare Pollard, author of Delphi
Mary and the Rabbit Dream casts the curious early 18th century story of Mary Toft in a totally fresh light. This is a furious, vituperative story about class, poverty, violence and women's bodies. - Stu Hennigan, author of Ghost Signs
WINNER OF THE HILARY WESTON WRITERS' TRUST PRIZE FOR NONFICTION
THE GLOBE AND MAIL: BOOKS TO READ IN FALL 2023
THE GLOBE AND MAIL BEST 100 BOOKS OF 2023
CBC BOOKS BEST CANADIAN NONFICTION OF 2023
Martha Baillie's richly layered response to her mother's passing, her father's life, and her sister's suicide is an exploration of how the body, the rooms we inhabit, and our languages offer the psyche a home, if only for a time.
Three essays, three deaths. The first is the death of the author's mother, a protracted disappearance, leaving space for thoughtfulness and ritual: the washing of her body, the making of a death mask. The second considers the author's father, his remoteness, his charm, a lacuna at the centre of the family even before his death, earlier than her mother's. And then, the shocking death of the author's sister, a visual artist and writer living with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, who writes three reasons to die on her bedroom wall and then takes her life.
In this close observation of a family, few absolutes hold, as experiences of reality diverge. A memoir of cascading grief and survival from the author of The Incident Report.
Martha Baillie's novels are thrillingly, joyously singular, that rare combination of sui generis and just plain generous. That There Is No Blue, her memoir, is all of those things too, is no surprise; still, she has gone somewhere extraordinary. This triptych of essays, which exquisitely unfolds the disobedient tale of the lives and deaths of her mother, her father, and her sister, is a meditation on the mystery and wonder of grief and art making and home and memory itself. It made me think of kintsugi, the Japanese art of repair, in which the mending is not hidden but featured and beautifully illuminated. Baillie's variety of attention, carved out of language, is tenderness, is love. - Maud Casey, author of City of Incurable Women
This is a stunning memoir, intense and meticulous in its observations of family life. Baillie subtly interrogates and conveys the devastating mistranslations that take place in childhood, the antagonism and porousness of siblings, and the tragedy of schizophrenia as it unfolds. I couldn't put it down. - Dr. Lisa Appignanesi, author of Mad, Bad and Sad and Everyday Madness
Exquisite. - Souvankham Thammavongsa, author of How to Pronounce Knife
I am grateful for this profound meditation on family and loss. - Charlie Kaufman, filmmaker
This strange, unsettling memoir of outer life and inner life and their bizarre twining captures the author's identity by way of her mother's death, her sister's failing battle with mental illness, and the mysterious figure of her father. It combines anguished guilt, deep tenderness, and bemused affection in highly evocative, often disturbing prose. Its brave honesty is amplified by a persistent lyricism; its undercurrent of fear is uplifted by a surprising, resilient hopefulness. It is both a plea for exoneration and an act of exoneration, an authentic meditation on the terrible difficulty of being human. - Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon