Adult Onset

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What to expect

'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

Critics Review

Beautifully rendered... frank and acidly funny... It's a large-hearted, resonant novel, filled with an interiority that opens out - a generous work.
Guardian
Sensitive and unmistakeably heartfelt
Sunday Times
Definitely recommended
Daily Mail
A complex, troubling novel that cuts with surgical precision into the sinew and muscle of family life.
Sarah Waters, author of The Paying Guests
Big, troubling and brave.
The New York Times
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
...explores the question of parental abuse and its origins with uncommon courage.
Now magazine, Canada
She has again delivered a masterpiece.
Michelle Dean, The Globe and Mail
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.
The Walrus
. . . 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.
Nancy Schiefer, The London Free Press, Canada
Ms. MacDonald strikes just the right tone as she exposes the brutal undercurrents of domestic life.
New York Times
. . . an intricate, gripping novel that is also a master class in turning the personal into the universal through art.
Brian Bethune, Maclean’s Canada
Many of us will see ourselves in the profound discomfort MacDonald has conjured... the book is an absolute triumph of terrifying authenticity.
National Post
Suspense builds; surely, horror awaits. . . . Macdonald's book remains spellbinding throughout. It is impossible to forget.
Paul Gessell, Quill & Quire
Remarkable...an engrossing, disturbing and layered tale.
Chicago Tribune on The Way the Crow Flies
[MacDonald's] prose...is always right and true, clean and penetrating.
Winnipeg Free Press on The Way The Crow Flies
One of the finest novels I've read in a long, long time.
The Washington Post on The Way The Crow Flies
MacDonald is a stunningly good writer . . . The Way the Crow Flies . . . secures for MacDonald a place, forever, in Canadian literature.
Calgary Herald
Macdonald is excellent at conversation - the phonecalls between Mary Rose and her mother are superb in their accuracy
Independent on Sunday

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