One Good Hustle Paperback by Billie Livingston

Product Details

• Publisher: Vintage Canada (2013-06-04)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 288 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780307359896
• Item Weight: 256.0 grams
• Dimensions: 8.0 x 5.12 x 0.75 cm

From award-winning writer Billie Livingston, an unsparing novel of loyalty and survival that is fierce, sharp and funny even when it's breaking your heart.
 
The child of two con artists, 16-year-old Sammie Bell always prided herself on knowing the score. But now she finds herself backed into a corner. After a hustle gone dangerously wrong, her mother, Marlene, is sliding into an abyss of alcoholic depression, spending her days fantasizing aloud about death—a goal Sammie is tempted to help her accomplish. Horrified by the appeal of this, Sammie packs a bag and leaves her mother to her own devices.
 
With her father missing in action, she has nowhere else to go but the home of a friend with two parents who seem to actually love their daughter and each other—and who awkwardly try to extend some semblance of family to Sammie. Throughout a long summer of crisis among the normals, Sammie is torn between her longing for the approval of the con-man father she was named for and her desire for the "weird, spearmint-fresh feeling" of life in the straight world. Sammie wants to be normal but fears that where she comes from makes that beyond the realm of possibility.

One Good Hustle chronicles two months in Sammie Bell's struggle with her dread that she is somehow doomed genetically to be just another hustler.

About the Author

BILLIE LIVINGSTON is a Canadian novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. She is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Going Down Swinging, Cease to Blush, and One Good Hustle, which was longlisted for the Giller Prize, nominated for the Canadian Library Association's Young Adult Book Award, and named a best book of the year by The Globe and Mail. She is also the author of Greedy Little Eyes, a short story collection that won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and the CBC's Bookie Award; The Crooked Heart of Mercy, a novel; and The Chick at the Back of the Church, a poetry collection for which Livinston won the Pat Lowther award. Her short story, "Sitting on the Edge of Marlene," has been adapted as a feature film. In 2017, Livingston received the Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award "in recognition of a remarkable body of work, and in anticipation of future contributions to Canadian literature."