From the internationally bestselling author of Fall on Your Knees comes a story about the joy and agony of motherhood, the dark undercurrents that break and hold families together, and the transformative power of forgiveness.
Mary Rose MacKinnon is a successful author of YA fiction doing a tour of duty as stay-at-home mom while her partner, Hilary, takes a turn focusing on her career. She tries valiantly to balance the (mostly) solo parenting of two young children with the relentless needs of her aging parents. But amid the hilarities of full-on domesticity arises a sense of dread. Do other people notice the dents in the expensive refrigerator? How long will it take Mary Rose to realize that the car alarm that has been going off all morning is hers, and how on earth did the sharpest pair of scissors in the house wind up in her toddler's hands?
As frustrations mount, she experiences a flare-up of forgotten symptoms of a childhood illness that compel her to rethink her own upbringing, her own family history. Over the course of one outwardly ordinary week, Mary Rose's world threatens to unravel, and the specter of violence raises its head with dangerous implications for her and her children. Adult Onset explores the pleasures and pressures of family bonds, powerful and yet so easily twisted and broken. Ann-Marie MacDonald has crafted a searing, terrifying, yet ultimately uplifting story. Ms. MacDonald strikes just the right tone as she exposes the brutal undercurrents of domestic life . . . [a] big, troubling and brave...novel. - New York Times Book Review
[Adult Onset is] the most accurate description of solo parenting I've ever read . . . [MacDonald's] writing is dizzying and brilliant, and often disorienting, which beautifully supports the novel's themes, perfectly capturing how it feels to be unmoored and seemingly alone. - Associated Press
Riveting . . . MacDonald's strong narrative is a compelling examination of the loneliness and the often-absurd helplessness of being a parent of young children. - Publishers Weekly
An affecting, multilayered account of domestic ennui and the painful effects of long-held secrets on three generations. - Kirkus
Ann-Marie MacDonald captures the dark hilarity of parenthood like nobody else. I gulped down Adult Onset in a single day. - Emma Donoghue, author ROOM and FROG MUSIC
A complex, troubling novel that cuts with surgical precision into the sinew and muscle of family life. - Sarah Waters, author of PAYING GUESTS
In Adult Onset, MacDonald . . . has again delivered a masterpiece. - Michelle Dean, the Globe & Mail Ann-Marie MacDonald is a bestselling, award-winning novelist, playwright, actor, and broadcaster. Her works include Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), Belle Moral: A Natural History, Fall on Your Knees, and The Way the Crow Flies. She lives in Toronto with her wife and their two children.
