EBOOK
About
The Reeds are a very loving, slightly dysfunctional family - but a summer of individual changes is about to shake their tight family unit. Bobby, the father, loses his executive job while his wife Mimi's lucrative home-run business leaps ahead. Their adopted son, Abbie, leverages his internet stardom into the makings of a career, while their adopted daughter, Dee, discovers who she really is. They'll have to navigate the shifting landscapes of commerce and fame in the age of the internet, office politics, gender dynamics, and sexuality in a world that has just seen Brexit, Trump, and heightened climate anxiety. Set in Montreal's west end, The Reeds is about family, love, and nostalgia while exploring the dehumanization of work and the power of art against a backdrop of mid-century modern furniture, shag carpeting, the relentlessness of change, gentrification, and Korean fried chicken. In many ways, The Reeds is an optimistic story about the middle class, its hopes, ambitions, and challenges. Over the course of a summer, each member of this close-knit family undergoes an intense change, impacting the trajectory of their own lives and that of the family overall.
Arjun Basu is the author of the Giller-longlisted Waiting for the Man (ECW Press). He loves bourbon and plays beer league hockey very poorly. A former magazine editor, he owns his own brand and content consultancy and is the host of The Full-Bleed, a podcast about the future of magazines. He lives with his wife in Montreal. Learn more about the author at arjunbasu.com.
Sales and Market Bullets
• AWARD-WINNING AND TRANSLATED AUTHOR: Waiting for the Man was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and was published in French in North America by Éditions Marchand de Feuilles.
• SET IN MONTREAL'S WEST END: The entire novel takes place in Montreal's west end, a location often neglected in literary fiction, and features locations such as the Lachine Canal and the intersection of Notre Dame de Grâce and Cte Saint-Luc.
• DIVERSE STORIES: While the novel features many ethnicities and languages, they are incidental to the plot. Instead, the vast diversity in the novel represents contemporary urban Canada. Bobby is Scottish-Mexican; Mimi is Japanese-French. Both their children are adopted (Abbie from Ghana, and Dee from India), and the next-door neighbors are an Orthodox Jewish family. The office environment is mostly Francophone.
• PRAISE FOR WAITING FOR THE MAN:
• "Waiting for the Man is observant and clever and doesn't take itself too seriously. Basu toys with his readers, pushing us away to point out the distance at which we hold the characters and stories that populate our pages and screens, and reminds us there is always more to the story." - Montreal Review of Books
• "Waiting for the Man is captivating, aggravating, enlightening, and redemptive." - Winnipeg Free Press
• "Perhaps the dark subtext to this entertaining novel is that movement is impossible, even for many seemingly privileged boys … Waiting for the Man hides a chilling truth under its light-hearted surface: the American Dream is a trap." - Quill & Quire
Arjun Basu is the author of the Giller-longlisted Waiting for the Man (ECW Press). He loves bourbon and plays beer league hockey very poorly. A former magazine editor, he owns his own brand and content consultancy and is the host of The Full-Bleed, a podcast about the future of magazines. He lives with his wife in Montreal. Learn more about the author at arjunbasu.com.
Sales and Market Bullets
• AWARD-WINNING AND TRANSLATED AUTHOR: Waiting for the Man was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and was published in French in North America by Éditions Marchand de Feuilles.
• SET IN MONTREAL'S WEST END: The entire novel takes place in Montreal's west end, a location often neglected in literary fiction, and features locations such as the Lachine Canal and the intersection of Notre Dame de Grâce and Cte Saint-Luc.
• DIVERSE STORIES: While the novel features many ethnicities and languages, they are incidental to the plot. Instead, the vast diversity in the novel represents contemporary urban Canada. Bobby is Scottish-Mexican; Mimi is Japanese-French. Both their children are adopted (Abbie from Ghana, and Dee from India), and the next-door neighbors are an Orthodox Jewish family. The office environment is mostly Francophone.
• PRAISE FOR WAITING FOR THE MAN:
• "Waiting for the Man is observant and clever and doesn't take itself too seriously. Basu toys with his readers, pushing us away to point out the distance at which we hold the characters and stories that populate our pages and screens, and reminds us there is always more to the story." - Montreal Review of Books
• "Waiting for the Man is captivating, aggravating, enlightening, and redemptive." - Winnipeg Free Press
• "Perhaps the dark subtext to this entertaining novel is that movement is impossible, even for many seemingly privileged boys … Waiting for the Man hides a chilling truth under its light-hearted surface: the American Dream is a trap." - Quill & Quire