Bøker av Lesley Crewe

Well, Dick's dead. Now what?Margo, his widow, is trying to dodge the tsunami of paperwork and other tasks coming her way. She doesn't deal with details-why do you think she was married in the first place? Dick always handled the drudgery. Not terribly well, it turns out.Margo's ex-husband (the first one, not the dead one) and their two adult children are trying to support Margo-who seems to be finally entering adulthood at the tender age of sixty-two. Dead Dick's ex-wife and their daughter consider Margo a maneater, so the funeral is a nightmare. Life in New Brunswick lately is a tornado of siblings, children, pets, marriages, health issues, and endless bureaucracy.And at the centre of it all is Margo, living alone for the very first time, going back to work as a drugstore cashier to make ends meet, and trying to endure everyone else's judgements about the woman she is when she barely knows herself.How old do you have to be to come of age?...and has anyone seen Dick's will?With humour and heart, national bestseller Lesley Crewe walks readers through the incredibly disruptive domino effects of the death of one unremarkable man-and the evolution of the flibbertigibbet wife he's left behind.

I Kid You Not! is a follow-up to bestselling author Lesley Crewe's first hit column-and-essay collection, Are You Kidding Me?! Here Lesley is hilarious and insightful as ever, giving us her take on everything from hockey to wildlife to the ache of missing our ancestors in ninety essays. She shares details of her proposal for the Mere Mortal Awards (Best Director goes to the "poor, long-suffering volunteer who organizes the parking lot at the Legion during the annual county fair"), whether she's used the pandemic as an opportunity to write more ("Piss off and leave me alone. I have a family-sized bag of M&M's to finish"), and what it's like to live with anxiety ("I'd much rather say I have the collywobbles or jim-jams.")Threaded throughout the book is the thrum of delight and deep love Lesley feels at becoming a grandmother to "baby blueberry" in early 2020.Lesley's columns have brought joy to readers for decades-I Kid You Not! will ensure that joy sustains for decades to come.

On paper, Kitty's life is perfect. She lives in Montreal, so vibrant in the 1950s; she married her childhood sweetheart, who happens to also be a handsome movie star; and her detective novels, written under a plausibly male nom de plume, are bestsellers. But Kitty is suffocating under the truth of her life: Montreal feels chaotic and lonely without her mother, and with her father all but estranged. Her husband is a glib Lothario. And she never, ever wants to write another detective novel. When she says as much to her publishers, they panic. She's their golden goose. And so they convince her to go on a writing retreat to a beautiful remote island, Cape Breton, where with solitude and a luxurious change of scenery, she'll be able to whip up her next book. At least, that was the plan.Kitty arrives in Cape Breton to a leaky, drafty shack and a cast of characters unlike anyone she's ever met. There's Ethel, who listens in on everyone's party line calls and never keeps good gossip to herself; generous Bertha and her enormous family...and Bertha's son, Wallace-Walrus, to all his nieces and nephews. A gentle giant who always has half a dozen children hanging off him. Soon Kitty's writing retreat turns her life upside down, and she has to face which parts of her life are non-negotiable and which she must cut loose. Can she preserve what she loves in Montreal now that Cape Breton is calling? If she frees herself from the weight of her past, will she float away altogether? From Globe and Mail-bestselling author Lesley Crewe comes a story of loneliness and belonging, and a love letter to the women who have always kept the kettles warm and the neighbours fed in rural Cape Breton.

Beloved and bestselling Cape Breton author Lesley Crewe's novels are now available in bright and bold, smaller-format editions. Chloe Sparrow is a twenty-five-year-old TV producer with a hit show on her hands. The Single Guy is a popular new reality series, where dozens of women are trying to woo bachelor veterinarian Austin Hawke. As the filming gets underway, though, accident-prone Chloe finds herself in one predicament after another: a wayward puck hits her in the face during a hockey game, she sprains her ankle at a dude ranch, and she falls out of a boat at high speed. But Chloe has bigger problems. The stress of her home life with her nutty but loveable Gramps and Aunt Ollie is getting to her, her job is consuming her, and painful memories from her past threaten to overwhelm her. To top it off, her co-worker Amanda is pressuring her to find a boyfriend. It doesn't take long before Chloe realizes that not having all her wishes come true might not be such a bad idea.

Linda, Bette, Gemma, and Augusta are four lifelong friends who live in Montreal. This year they're all going to turn fifty, so they decide to take a trip to New York together (courtesy of Linda's philandering husband's Visa Platinum). But at the LaGuardia airport washroom, Bette accidentally switches bags with a young mother who's actually smuggling diamonds for the mob, and things start going terribly wrong. When they kill an aggressive cab driver with pepper spray, the four friends know this is not going to be the trip of shopping and Broadway shows they'd expected.A series of miscommunications and mishaps entangles the friends even further into the criminal underworld of New York. But out of all the bad luck (Linda's husband is staying at the same hotel as the friends, with his new girlfriend) and bad people (mobsters, drug addicts, and Linda's husband) emerge four fifty-year-old avengers of truth and justice. In the style of Crewe's Shoot Me, Hit and Mrs. is a wildly entertaining comedic romp.

For the first time, bestselling novelist, columnist, and humorist Lesley Crewe's finest newspaper columns are collected in one place.Not merely razor sharp, Crewe's wit is also ocean wide, taking in everything from the humiliations of breast pumping to the indignities of aging, from the frantic excess of holiday preparations to the homey irritations of a long marriage.As precise in her observations as Jane Austen and as fractious on occasion as Oscar the Grouch, Crewe also has a sweet, tender centre, taking us from a hearty laugh to a good cry in a single paragraph. Readers will relate to Crewe's ache at missing her mom, her nostalgia for her childhood, her frustrations at raising teenagers, and her impatience for terrible parking lot etiquette in equal measure. The book spans sixteen years' worth of columns for The Cape Bretoner Magazine, Cahoots Magazine, and The Chronicle Herald.Are You Kidding Me?! is a side-splitting, heartwarming, Cape Breton-flavoured celebration of the little things.

Lesley CreweΓÇÖs newest novel brings readers from WWI England to 1960s Nova Scotia, following a spoon-stealing memoirist who inherits the family farmΓÇöand the family.

A new smaller format of Lesley Crewe's second novel, now with a reader's guide and author interview.The South End house where Elsie Brooks and her big, complicated family live is bursting with secrets. Elsie's banished husband lives in the basement. Her lonely sister lives in the attic. Her twenty-something daughters come and go as they please. And when the renegade ninety-one-year-old archaeologist they all know as Aunt Hildy comes home to die, the poor old place becomes impossibly full-of hidden meanings and hidden treasure, of murder and mystery.Shoot Me is a story about family, fortune, and figuring out who you are. Bestselling author Lesley Crewe has created a mixed-up, frantic, ultimately lovable East Coast family. But as Aunt Hildy would say, "Life is not something that needs to be tamed. It's messy. Always was, always will be."

From the author of Relative Happiness and Shoot Me comes a riveting story about one terrible secret-a secret kept in shame, buried deep for self-preservation, and exposed in a moment that changes forever the lives of everyone involved.Ava Harris is a famous actress living the life of the rich and fabulous in L.A. when a family crisis calls her home. It's been ten years since she's set foot in Glace Bay, Cape Breton-back when she was plain old Libby MacKinnon. Why she ran away, no one knows. Returning home, she must face her family, her friends, and her first love, Seamus O'Reilly, whose heart broke the day she left.Ava is a good little actress, determined that no one will know what happened. She will keep the truth buried at all costs-even if she has to run again. But secrets have a way of surfacing, especially in a small town, and love has a way of blasting through the toughest barriers. While Ava can never go home again, perhaps Libby finally can.

Chloe Sparrow is a twenty-five-year-old TV producer with a hit show on her hands. The Single Guy is a popular new reality series, where dozens of women are trying to woo bachelor veterinarian Austin Hawke. As the filming gets underway, though, accident-prone Chloe finds herself in one predicament after another: a wayward puck hits her in the face during a hockey game, she sprains her ankle at a dude ranch, and she falls out of a boat at high speed. But Chloe has bigger problems. The stress of her home life with her nutty but loveable Gramps and Aunt Ollie is getting to her, her job is consuming her, and painful memories from her past threaten to overwhelm her. To top it off, her co-worker Amanda is pressuring her to find a boyfriend. It doesn't take long before Chloe realizes that not having all her wishes come true might not be such a bad idea.

From best-selling author Lesley Crewe comes a poignant and moving novel.Sisters Bay and Tansy are complete opposites. Widowed mother Bay has never lived anywhere but Louisbourg; restless Tansy left the town as a a teenager and stayed away for years.And now, Tansy is home. Home, and unwittingly falling in love with her sister's almost-boyfriend. Home, and befriending Ashley when all Bay can do is fight with her teenaged daughter. Home, and desperately hiding the real reason she fled all those years ago.When crisis hits the family, the sisters draw closer. But the closer they are, the more explosive their relationship, and soon their troubled history threatens to shatter what's left of their family forever.Complex and heartwarming, Her Mother's Daughter is an exploration of family and friends and the tangled skeins of love, mistakes, and secrets twisting between us all.