Watching You Without Me

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Anansi, 2019 - Fiction - 367 pages

The highly anticipated new literary suspense novel from Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author Lynn Coady.

After her mother's sudden death, Karen finds herself back in her childhood home in Nova Scotia for the first time in a decade, acting as full-time caregiver to Kelli, her older sister. Overwhelmed with grief and the daily needs of Kelli, who was born with a developmental disability, Karen begins to feel consumed by the isolation of her new role. On top of that, she's weighed down with guilt over her years spent keeping Kelli and their independent-to-a-fault mother, Irene, at arm's length. And so when Trevor -- one of Kelli's support workers -- oversteps his role and offers friendly advice and a shoulder to cry on, Karen gratefully accepts his somewhat overbearing friendship. When she discovers how close Trevor was to Irene, she comes to trust him all the more. But as Trevor slowly insinuates himself into Karen and Kelli's lives, Karen starts to grasp the true aspect of his relationship with her mother -- and to experience for herself the suffocating nature of Trevor's "care."

Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author Lynn Coady delivers a creepy and wholly compelling novel about the complex relationship between mothers and daughters and sisters, women and men, and who to trust and how to trust in a world where the supposedly selfless act of caregiving can camouflage a sinister self-interest.

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About the author (2019)

Lynn Coady was born in Cape Breton. She has a Bachelor of Arts from Carleton University and an MFA from the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver. She has edited an anthology of new writing from Canada's east coast called 'Victory Meat,' and a novel called 'Mean Boy' has been sold to Doubleday Canada. She writes for newspapers and magazines from time to time as well. Her title, Strange Heaven has won the Dartmouth Book Award in 1999, the Atlantic Bookseller's Choice Award in 1999, the Air Canada/Canadian Author's Association Award for Most Promising Writer Under Thirty in 1998, and was shortlisted for the Governer-General's Award for Fiction in 1998. Her title, Play the Monster Blind, won the Canadian Author's Association's Jubilee Award for a short fiction collection in 2001, was shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour in 2000, was shortlisted again for the CNIB Award, and The Writer's Trust Award in 2001.

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