The Spectacular A Novel

by Whittall, Zoe

• ISBN13: 9781524799410
• ISBN10: 1524799416
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2021-09-14
• Publisher: Ballantine Books

Summary

Three generations of women strive for real freedom in this startling, provocative novel exploring sexuality, gender, and maternal ambivalence, from the acclaimed author of The Best Kind of People.

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 favor strands her at the border.

Fortysomething Carola is just surfacing from a sex scandal at the yoga center 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 this sharply observed novel, Zoe Whittall captures three very different women who struggle to build an authentic life. Definitions of family, romance, gender, and love will radically change as they seek out lives that are nothing less than spectacular.

Author Biography

Zoe Whittall's third novel, The Best Kind of People, is currently being adapted as a limited series by director Sarah Polley. It was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and a best book of the year by the Walrus, the Globe and Mail, Toronto Life, and the National Post. Her second novel, Holding Still for as Long as Possible, won a Lambda Literary Award for trans fiction and was an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book. Her debut novel, Bottle Rocket Hearts, won the Dayne Ogilvie Prize and is being adapted for the screen. She has worked as a TV writer on the Emmy Award-winning comedy Schitt's Creek and the Baroness Von Sketch Show, for which she won a Canadian Screen Award. She has written three volumes of poetry, most recently an anniversary reissue of The Emily Valentine Poems, about which Eileen Myles said, "I would like to know everything about this person." Zoe Whittall was born on a sheep farm in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, has an MFA from the University of Guelph, and has called Toronto home since 1997.