The Spectacular

It's 1997 and Missy's band has finally hit the big time as they tour across America. At twenty-two years old, Missy gets on stage every night and plays the song about her absent mother that made the band famous. Missy is the only girl in the band and she's determined to party just as hard as everyone else, loving and leaving someone in every town. But then a forgotten party favour strands her at the border.

Forty-something Carola is just surfacing from a sex scandal at the yoga centre where she has been living, when she sees her daughter, Missy, for the first time in ten years on the cover of a music magazine.

Ruth is eighty-three and planning her return to the Turkish seaside village where she spent her childhood. But when her granddaughter Missy winds up crashing at her house, she decides it's time that the strong and stubborn women in her family find a way to understand each other again.

In her new book,by turns sharp and provocative, Zoe Whittall captures three generations of very different women who struggle to build an authentic life in the absence of traditional familial and marital structures. Definitions of family, romance, gender and love will radically change as they seek out lives that are nothing less than spectacular. (From HaperAvenue)

Zoe Whittall is a novelist and screenwriter from Toronto. Her other books includeThe Best Kind of People, which was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize andis currently being adapted for limited series by Sarah Polley,Holding Still for as Long as PossibleandBottle Rocket HeartsShe has also written forSchitt's Creekand theBaroness Von Sketch Show.

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