The Crooked Heart of Mercy Hardcover by Billie Livingston

Product Details

• Publisher: Random House Canada (2016-01-05)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 272 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780345815385
• Item Weight: 371.95 grams
• Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 1.1 cm

The Crooked Heart of Mercy is a brave, funny and heartbreaking novel about faith and family, love and forgiveness, and how people survive unimaginable loss. It features an indelible trio of characters who could only come from the imagination of Billie Livingston. There's Ben, whose world we enter on the first page: he's a limo driver who, after he loses his son, finds himself locked up in a psych ward with a hole in his head he can't explain. His wife, Maggie, the other narrator of the story, is locked up in her own grief, unable to reach out to her husband. Then there is Maggie's brother, Francis, an unlikely priest with a drinking problem and only occasional interest in celibacy, whose latest fall from the wagon was caught on video and has gone viral as Drunk Priest Propositions Cop.
     How they come together to heal each other's many wounds is the magic of this novel, as is its intensity, its wit, its deep sense of the absurd, and the surprising grace at its core.

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."