Synopsis – Good to a Fault
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.
The Globe and Mail
Quill & Quire
FFWD Weekly
The Montreal Gazette
Saskatoon StarPhoenix
The Vancouver Sun
The Toronto Star
The first episode of the Open Arms podcast
Four-page PDF (200 K)
Chapter 1 PDF (170 K)
Marina Endicott’s second novel, Good to a Fault, was a finalist for the 2008 Scotiabank Giller Prize, one of The Globe and Mail’s Top 100 Books of 2008, winner of the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award -- Canada and the Caribbean, one of the picks for Canada Reads 2010 and was longlisted for the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the world’s richest literary prize. Her debut novel, Open Arms, was a finalist for the 2001 Amazon Books in Canada First Novel Award and was serialized on CBC Radio’s Between the Covers. Marina’s stories have been featured in Coming Attractions and shortlisted for both the Journey Prize and the Western Magazine Awards. She has had three plays produced and her long poem, The Policeman’s Wife, Some Letters, was shortlisted for the CBC Literary Awards in 2006. Marina was born in Golden, BC and has lived in Saskatoon, Vancouver, Nova Scotia, Toronto and London, England. She has been an actor and director and was Dramaturge of the Saskatchewan Playwrights Centre and Associate Dramaturge at the Banff Centre’s Playwrights Colony. She lives in Edmonton.