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THE CROOKED HEART OF MERCY

Billie Livingston

For anyone who loves Jennifer Egan and Lorrie Moore, a smart, gritty and darkly funny story of how a family rebuilds itself after an unthinkable tragedy, by an award-winning author.
Ben is a formerly sharp-tongued limo driver who finds himself locked up in a psych ward with a hole in his head he can’t explain. His wife, Maggie, is the only one who can save him but she’s paralyzed with grief and struggling to find her own redemption. Maggie’s brother Francis, a gloriously debauched Catholic priest, is the newly minted star of YouTube’s latest viral video sensation thanks to yet another DUI. How they come together to heal each other’s wounds in the face of unimaginable heartache is what forms the basis of this breakthrough novel from one of Canada’s literary stars.

The novel has a gritty love story at its heart, but it’s also about the meaning of family and forgiveness. It’s never earnest or melancholy, it’s smart and bitterly funny. It’s about what we can find in ourselves to forgive and what we can and should be able to survive. The narrative unfolds from Ben and Maggie’s perspective in alternating chapters, and Billie captures each character exquisitely; Ben is confused and his voice plays on language while Maggie’s is acerbic and yet at the same time desperate to believe.

No other writer can combine the dark, the funny, and the tender like Billie can—her voice and the worlds she creates are nothing short of addicting.

Billie Livingston is the award-winning author of three novels, a collection of short stories as well as a poetry collection. Her most recent novel, One Good Hustle, a Globe and Mail Best Book selection, was nominated for the 2012 Giller Prize and for the Canadian Library Association’s Young Adult book of the year. Her short story Sitting on the Edge of Marlene has been adapted into a feature film and will debut at the Vancouver International Film Festival this fall.
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Published 2016-03-01 by Morrow

Comments

You must read Billie Livingston. She is the sort of writer who rejects pomp, instead dealing out the plain story in language that is undecorated by attempts to be an artiste, and which conjures place and character seamlessly. And she makes Dickens look like Little Mary Sunshine.

review Globe and Mail

Livingston succeeds gorgeously in capturing the messiness and unresolvable ambiguities of familial love. Her lovingly drawn, half-crazy characters always transcend a caseworker's clichés.

review National Post

Livingston's characters are scrappers. They're canny and sharp and share a dark streak of humour that comes from the love of family and the communal understanding of knowing who is the enemy.

review New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal

It would be easy to use words like “heartwarming” and “uplifting” to describe what Livingston has accomplished here with her vivid ensemble cast, but there are far more complex things happening on the page beyond just a simple feel-good narrative. The Crooked Heart of Mercy truly highlights how life often gets in the way of getting better, but we bravely take from it what we can to move forward – and maybe make a joke or two in the process.

review Globe and Mail

Out of an interview with the author: There are many ways in which Billie Livingston mined real life – hers and others’ – in crafting her new novel. From truth-can-be-stranger-than-fiction stories – ripped from the headlines and her own history – she wove together the stories of three people to create her new work of actual fiction, The Crooked Heart of Mercy.

review Globe and Mail

Livingston has made her rep as one of the most dangerous writers you will ever be lucky enough to encounter.

review The Vancouver Review

Livingston has been shortlisted for the Giller Award, Canada’s richest literary prize. She has won the Danuta Gleed Award and the CBC Bookie. She is respected and, in some circles, revered. But right now, we’re writing about [THE CROOKED HEART OF MERCY] that was sent to reviewers by Random in Canada: and not just because we got a front row seat... When this galley arrived a few months ago, we sat up and paid attention. 'The Writer You Need to Read Right Now.' Of course. And you do, too.

review January Magazine's The Writer You Need to Read Right Now

Livingston gets to the heart of human need, with all its confusion and messiness and she does so with textured emotion and blistering prose. Most importantly, by taking often overused and amorphous terms such as ‘forgiveness’ and ‘spirituality’ and bringing them down to earth, Livingston allows Ben and Maggie to come to a stumbling understanding of what it means to survive day to day, transcend terrible trauma, and to eventually regain the capacity to give and receive love.

review Toronto Star