Longlisted for the 2024 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour

In this darkly funny debut from Lucie Pagé, characters collide in unexpected ways as they search to create meaning in their lives.

A university English sessional teacher searches for his missing blind pit bull, not entirely aware that his relationship is coming unravelled. Katherine, his girlfriend, pays far more attention to her walk-on role in an alternative theatre production. Fourteen-year-old Becca struggles to get her mother’s attention, while her mother provides calorie-wise snacking and fashion advice and dates Becca’s psychologist. Karl fails to control his embarrassing and shameful bad habit at his dead-end telemarketing job.

Pagé weaves together narratives that speak of people adrift in the conflicting tides of the first decades of the twenty-first century in a novel that echoes the works of Lynda Barry.