Little Monsters

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

A riveting novel about Cape Cod, complicated families and long-buried secrets

Ken and Abby Gardner were raised in a remote home on Cape Cod. As adults, their relationship is strained, but their lives are still deeply intertwined. Ken is a successful businessman with political ambitions and a picture-perfect family, but when his wife walks in on him in an internet chatroom, she demands they go to therapy. Abby is a talented artist who depends on her brother's goodwill, in part because he owns the studio where she lives and works.

Their father, Adam, a brilliant oceanographer, raised them as a single parent. As his seventieth birthday approaches and he begins to stare down his mortality, he comes off his bipolar disorder medication in order to make one last scienti?c breakthrough; he has secretly stopped taking his pills, which he knows will infuriate his children.

Meanwhile, Abby and Ken are both harbouring secrets of their own, and there is a new person on the periphery of the family - Steph, who doesn't make her connection known.

Set over one fraught summer, Little Monsters is an absorbing, sharply observed family story by a writer who knows Cape Cod inside and out - its Edenic lushness and its snakes.

'Gorgeous, gripping, I couldn't put it down' RUTH OZEKI

'Beautiful, lyrical and unvarnished, Adrienne Brodeur's Little Monsters delivers its powerful emotional punches so subtly that they sneak up on you and leave you floored' MIRANDA COWLEY HELLER, author of THE PAPER PALACE

©2023 Adrienne Brodeur (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

  • Gorgeous, gripping, I couldn’t put it down. Adrienne Brodeur does family intrigue and dysfunction like no one else I know. In Little Monsters, she once again draws back the curtain on a world of seaside wealth and casual privilege, to reveal a family unravelled by the lies, rivalries, secrets, and silences that have bound it together

    Ruth Ozeki

  • Brodeur creates an evocative sense of place in a Cape Cod-set novel that’s affecting and powerful

    Observer

  • An utterly gripping, immersive story of one family’s unravelling traumas and hopes. It will capture and hold you in its depths. Brodeur creates characters who are so real, so complex, I could almost touch them, feel them sitting beside me

    Christy Lefteri, author of The Beekeeper of Aleppo

  • A page-turner about the conspiracy of silence and corrosive nature of skeletons in the closet

    Financial Times

  • Beautiful, lyrical and unvarnished, Adrienne Brodeur’s Little Monsters delivers its powerful emotional punches so subtly that they sneak up on you and leave you floored

    Miranda Cowley Heller, New York Times bestselling author of The Paper Palace

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