Little Monsters

'Smart, funny and beautifully written. Brodeur is a brilliant dissector of family relationships, a lyricist of the natural world, and an astute observer of our inner turmoils' MONICA ALI

'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

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.