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Good to a Fault
By: Marina Endicott
2008, 372 p.
 
Pondering her own failings and lack of purpose, middle-aged Clara Purdy finds her life turned upside down when she crashes her car into the Gage family’s Dodge Dart.
Virtually homeless, Lorraine and Clayton Gage have been drifting from town to town and living in their car along with their three children, including baby Pearce, and Lorraine’s mother. When bruises from the accident prove to be symptoms of Lorraine’s late-stage cancer, Clara decides to move the entire family into her home.
Childless and parentless, Clara is ill-prepared for the new change in her circumstances and the consequences of her decision: exhaustion, anger, hilarity, unexpected love, and the scrutiny of her own motives in offering such hospitality to strangers. Is she acting out of guilt, goodness or selfishness?
Read an excerpt.
Acknowledgements and awards:
2009 – Winner Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Canada and the Caribbean region)
2009 – Finalist Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction
2009 – Finalist ReLit Awards
2009 – Finalist Evergreen Award
2008 – Finalist Scotiabank Giller Prize
SPECIAL AUTHOR EVENT
Book Buzz Live Chat - Wednesday, December 16, 7-8 p.m.
Join author Marina Endicott for a live online chat.
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Born in 1958 in Golden, B.C., Marina Endicott grew up in Halifax, Yarmouth and Toronto. After working as an actor, she moved to London, England and began her fiction-writing career. In 1984, Endicott returned to Canada, settling in Saskatchewan where she continued to write while working in the theatre as an actor, director and as the dramaturge of the Saskatchewan Playwrights Centre.
Endicott’s first novel, Open Arms, 2001, was a finalist for the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award and was broadcast on CBC Radio's Between the Covers in 2003. Married, with two teen-aged children, she now teaches creative writing at the University of Alberta. Currently, Endicott is working on a novel about the Bell Auroras, a sister-trio vaudeville act which toured the Canadian prairies in 1909.
Author Interviews:
Radio New Zealand (audio)
CKUA Radio Network (audio)
All Things Said & Done
Calgary Herald
National Post
