Books
Things Go Flying (Heritage Group, Brindle & Glass; 2008)
A hilarious and wildly inventive contemporary comedy about how the past can come back to haunt you. Literally.
Praise for Things Go Flying
“A wonderfully alive, funny and inventive novel” - David Adams Richards
“Shari Lapeña’s novel is wonderful high-purpose fun. The characters try to be unremarkable, but remarkable things keep happening to them. I enjoyed it tremendously.”- Paul Quarrington
“Things Go Flying is a delight to read: funny and tender and vibrant. The story rips along, told in vivid scenes that are masterfully paced. It’s all working in this novel: conflicted characters frustrated with each other, hope-mangled maybe, but still optimistic. It rings true in the most charming and most satisfying way. I gobbled it up.”- Eliza Clark
“enormously appealing…” Quill & Quire
“Lapeña’s touch is sure, her labours invisible…Family is strange. Lapeña taps into its mix of the familiar and the unfathomable, ramping up the human skirmishes with a guerilla foray into the question of evil…” The Globe and Mail
“a first novel worthy of attention…” The Vancouver Sun
“Hilarious, fast-paced and irreverent…a continual giggle…” Owen Sound Sun Times
Harold is clearly suffering from a mid-life depression, brought on in part by the abrupt death of his one-time best friend, Tom. Harold’s wife Audrey, an increasingly frustrated housewife, is a control freak silently harbouring an explosive secret. They have two teenaged sons: John, the feckless eldest, who appears to be headed for disaster (his girlfriend wants him to steal a car); and Dylan, a caustic observer who doesn’t know as much as he thinks he does.
Things Go Flying in the Walker household when Harold’s long-deceased mother comes back to haunt them. Harold is horrified to find himself suddenly communicating with the dead. He has his mother’s gift—and if there was ever a gift he wanted to return, it’s this one! A door has opened onto the past—and Audrey is similarly terrified. How is she to safeguard her secret now? If she can’t control this world, how is she to control the next one? And how will she protect her good china?
As his situation becomes increasingly complicated, Harold, who has made a practice of avoiding things all his life, must confront two problems—how to find meaning in this life, and how to come to grips with the mostly terrifying idea that life just might go on forever!
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Read an excerpt from Things Go Flying.
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