‘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
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, 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.
(P)2015 Penguin Random House Audio
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, 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.
(P)2015 Penguin Random House Audio
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Reviews
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.
...explores the question of parental abuse and its origins with uncommon courage.
She has again delivered a masterpiece.
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.
. . . 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.
. . . an intricate, gripping novel that is also a master class in turning the personal into the universal through art.
Many of us will see ourselves in the profound discomfort MacDonald has conjured... the book is an absolute triumph of terrifying authenticity.
Suspense builds; surely, horror awaits. . . . Macdonald's book remains spellbinding throughout. It is impossible to forget.
Remarkable...an engrossing, disturbing and layered tale.
[MacDonald's] prose...is always right and true, clean and penetrating.
One of the finest novels I've read in a long, long time.
MacDonald is a stunningly good writer . . . The Way the Crow Flies . . . secures for MacDonald a place, forever, in Canadian literature.
Beautifully rendered... frank and acidly funny... It's a large-hearted, resonant novel, filled with an interiority that opens out - a generous work.
Sensitive and unmistakeably heartfelt
Definitely recommended
Ms. MacDonald strikes just the right tone as she exposes the brutal undercurrents of domestic life.
Big, troubling and brave.
Macdonald is excellent at conversation - the phonecalls between Mary Rose and her mother are superb in their accuracy