Adrienne Brodeur

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Little Monsters

'Affecting and powerful' OBSERVER

'Beautiful, lyrical and unvarnished' MIRANDA COWLEY HELLER

'A page-turner' FINANCIAL TIMES

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.