"Bold and tender, poetic and stark, this spins an absorbing story of family secrets, dysfunctional sibling bonds, the deep-rooted trauma of grief, and shifting cycles of life."
Set during one seminal summer in Cape Cod against the backdrop of the 2016 US presidential election, Adrienne Brodeur's Little Monsters dissects the secrets and emotional traumas of a dysfunctional family to gripping effect. Driven by complex, troubled characters, it’s a compelling story for fans of family dramas that pack emotional punch.
Adam, an oceanographer patriarch, is about to reach his seventieth birthday after raising his kids as a single dad — his wife died shortly after giving birth to his now-38-year-old daughter. From the off, Adam is established as a conundrum of a character. Far from being entirely likeable, he’s certainly intriguing. Grappling with his mortality, Adam decides to stop taking meds for his bipolar disorder in the hope that will help him bring a huge scientific breakthrough to fruition.
Similarly, Adam’s son Ken is hardly a likeable chap. An aspiring Republican politician and extremely wealthy businessman who’d “just joined the ranks of men who owned the world and could buy whatever they wanted”, Ken presents himself to the world as being 100% self-assured. He also seems utterly devoid of empathy, especially when it comes to his sister Abby. She’s an artist who works in her mother’s former “glorious and free studio space in the dunes”, which is technically now owned by Ken. Pregnant at 38, “for the first time in decades, she was hungry. Instead of wanting to disappear, Abby wanted to be seen.”
As tension between Ken and Abby prickles, as Adam becomes increasingly frenzied, a stranger enters their life. With everyone harbouring secrets, the stage is set for a pulse-quickening public showdown and personal revolutions.
| Primary Genre | General Fiction |
| Other Genres: |
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.
Little Monsters features in the following genres: General Fiction, Family Drama, Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Narrative theme: Death, grief, loss, Narrative theme: Sense of place, Narrative theme: Love and relationships, Fiction, Fiction: narrative themes
Little Monsters is available in Paperback, Hardback
Little Monsters was written by Adrienne Brodeur and published by Hutchinson Heinemann an imprint of Cornerstone
Little Monsters has 416 pages
£13.49
