Good to a Fault
By Marina Endicott
September 2009
5 x 8 paper 400 pp
ISBN 978-1-55111-999-1
C$19.95
Winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award, Canada and the Caribbean
Finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize
Freehand Books is pleased to be making Marina Endicott’s award-winning and bestselling novel available in a new paperback format.
In a moment of self-absorption, Clara Purdy’s life takes a sharp left turn when she crashes into a beat-up car carrying an itinerant family of six. The Gage family had been travelling to a new life in Fort McMurray, but bruises on the mother, Lorraine, prove to be late-stage cancer rather than remnants of the accident. Recognizing their need as her responsibility, Clara tries to do the right thing and moves the children, husband and horrible grandmother into her own house—then has to cope with the consequences of practical goodness.
As Lorraine walks the borders of death, Clara expands into life, finding purpose, energy and unexpected love amidst the hard, unaccustomed work of sharing her days. But the burden is not Clara’s alone: Lorraine’s children must cope with divided loyalties and Lorraine must live with her growing, unpayable debt to Clara - and the feeling that Clara has taken her place.
What, exactly, does it mean to be good? When is sacrifice merely selfishness? What do we owe in this life and what do we deserve? Marina Endicott looks at life and death through the compassionate lens of a born novelist: being good, being at fault, and finding some balance on the precipice.
Praise for Good to a Fault
“Marina Endicott is really funny, a sweet-natured but sharp-eyed and quick-tongued social observer in the Jane Austen-Barbara Pym-Anne Tyler tradition, who can wring love, revulsion and hilarity from readers in a single page.”
–T.F. Rigelhof, The Globe and Mail
“Endicott manages to create utterly realistic characters with believable dialogue and thoughts, whether adult or child. And she makes them sympathetic even when they are doing something wrong…Like Endicott’s first book, Open Arms, and reminiscent of the work of Carol Shields, Good to a Fault is a profoundly humane novel.”
–Candace Fertile, The Vancouver Sun
See Biography of Marina Endicott
