Mona Awad’s Featured Book

All’s Well

“Mind-blowing. Equal parts brilliant and hilarious.” — Heather O’Neill, bestselling author of The Lonely Hearts Hotel and Lullabies for Little Criminals

From the critically acclaimed author of Bunny, a darkly funny novel about a theatre professor suffering chronic pain who, in the process of staging a troubled production of Shakespeare’s most maligned play, suddenly and miraculously recovers.

Miranda Fitch’s life is a waking nightmare. The accident that ended her burgeoning acting career left her with excruciating, chronic pain, a failed marriage, and a deepening dependence on painkillers. And now she’s on the verge of losing her job as a college theatre director. Determined to put on Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, the play that promised — and cost — her everything, she faces a mutinous cast hell-bent on staging Macbeth instead. Miranda sees her chance at redemption slip through her fingers.

That’s when she meets three strange benefactors who have an eerie knowledge of Miranda’s past and a tantalizing promise for her future: one where the show goes on, her rebellious students get what’s coming to them, and the invisible, doubted pain that’s kept her from the spotlight is made known.

With prose Margaret Atwood has described via Twitter as “no punches pulled, no hilarities dodged… genius,” Mona Awad has concocted her most potent, subversive novel yet. All’s Well is the story of a woman at her breaking point and a formidable, piercingly funny indictment of our collective refusal to witness and believe female pain.

Buy the Book:
Owl’s Nest Books | Shelf Life Books | Indigo | Massy Books (BC)

Borrow the Book from the Library:
Calgary Public Library

Mona Awad’s Other Book

Bunny

The Vegetarian meets Heathers in this darkly funny, seductively strange novel from the acclaimed author of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

Samantha Heather Mackey couldn’t be more different from the other members of her master’s program at New England’s elite Warren University. A self-conscious scholarship student who prefers the company of her imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort–a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other “Bunny,” and are often found entangled in a group hug so tight it seems their bodies might become permanently fused.

But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies’ exclusive monthly “Smut Salon,” and finds herself drawn as if by magic to their front door–ditching her only friend, Ava, an audacious art school dropout, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into Bunny world, and starts to take part in the off-campus “Workshop” where they devise their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur, and her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies are brought into deadly collision.

A spellbinding, down-the-rabbit-hole tale about loneliness and belonging, creativity and agency, and female friendship and desire, Bunny is the dazzlingly original second book from an author with tremendous “insight into the often-baffling complexities of being a woman” (The Atlantic).

Buy the Book:
Owl’s Nest Books | Shelf Life Books

Borrow the Book from the Library:
Calgary Public Library