Launch of Be Good by Stacey May Fowles
Tightrope Books is proud to announce the launch of Stacey May
Fowles’s debut novel, Be Good. Featuring a performance by Tomboyfriend, and readings by Dayle Furlong and Fraser Sutherland.
About the book:
When Hannah spots Morgan on the first day of a second-semester art history class she is instantly captivated by her careless beauty and carefree attitude. The two women strike up a friendship based on days spent drinking cheap wine and chain-smoking on their fire escape in Montreal. Things get complicated when Morgan leaves her boyfriend Jacob and takes up with an older man, and Hannah meets Finn and follows him to Vancouver.
In this gritty first novel by Stacey May Fowles, a group of Canadian twenty-somethings wrestle with sex, love, and lies. Each character has a distinct persona made of secrets and deceptions, which is shattered by the end of the book. Set against the acutely drawn urban landscapes of Montreal and Vancouver, Morgan and Hannah struggle to navigate the maze of love affairs, failed relationships, obsessions, and departures from the familiar.
Deftly shifting perspective from the innocent and idealistic Hannah to the streetwise and damaged Morgan, to their friends and the men in their lives, Be Good eloquently exposes the lies we tell ourselves and others in order to cope with life and reveals the ongoing alienation and isolation of a world where the only reliable narrator is the future.
Be Good whispers clumsy drunken memories and desperate revisionist accounts into the ears of readers, capturing perfectly the quarter-life crisis in all its sexy, sleazy, blissful agony.
-- Zoe Whittall author of Bottle Rocket Hearts
In turns, humourous and hard-wired, tawdry and tender, Stacey May Fowles’ Be Good is essential reading for women in their 20s. For anyone beyond, this novel rebuilds the importance of those years, illuminating the darkest parts, and startling in its ability to remind you where you’ve been. Fowles knows how to make sentences shake their booty in the best of vintage dresses. Her writing sings love songs for best friends who have gone to the brink.
-- Emily Schultz, author of Black Coffee Night and Joyland
Stacey May Fowles's first novel is a startling and beautiful examination of love sickness in its many forms. It's a novel of true love and dirty secrets, high comedy and heartbreak, and Fowles pulls no punches and misses no marks. Bright, smart, and sexy, Be Good announces the arrival of a wonderful new voice in Canadian fiction.
-- Michael Redhill, Man Booker Prize nominated author of Consolation
