Grown Ups: British Book Awards Author of the Year 2022

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Thank you Netgalley and Penguin Random House Canada for the opportunity to review this fabulous book. But this - tonight - was as bad as Rory, that same light-headed combination of disbelief and stone-cold certainty: something terrible had happened. Moving, relatable and infinitely tender, Keyes takes the most uncomfortable human experiences and treats them with real dignity.

Grown Ups: British Book Awards Author of the Year 2022

The novel starts at the dinner party where Cara is letting secrets fly after getting a knock to the head.We celebrate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander stories, traditions and living cultures; and we pay our respects to Elders past and present. This was a family saga of epic proportions both in length of book but also in depth of shambled relationships and lives. Now, I live in New Zealand, so I am going to throw Ngaruawahia at you, and see how you get on with pronouncing that.

Grown Ups by Marian Keyes review – comic, convincing and true

The women here are loudly feminist, telling their men they will take care of them, not just emotionally, thank you very much, but financially, too. The characters in this story are expertly written, like most families they have their flaws and their dysfunctional members. It’s a compulsive read, funny and dark and knowing like the best of Keyes’ work and I absolutely didn’t want it to end.As always, Keyes's genius lies in making the darkest, most difficult aspects of humanity mentionable and manageable. This book is also entertaining, powerful, laugh-out-loud, feel-good reading with tragic and tear jerking elements. I very much like that They have beautiful, successful wives, they have a tremendous brotherly bond, their kids get on well, and they love to spend time together - whether that's a birthday party or a weekend away. There are a lot of characters to remember and it took me a while to sort out where they fit within the family.

Grown Ups by Marian Keyes | Waterstones

The families spend a lot of time together (Easter etc) but there are tensions simmering under the surface, second marriages, truculent teenagers, step-siblings, fears of inadequacy, etc.

I think that Keyes in some weird way was okay with the one relationship, and disgusted with the second. Katherine’s emotional shutdown is a response to a traumatic relationship that defines her past, and Fintan isn’t a martyr to his illness – he grieves, loves, and rages with the rest of us. Since the publication of her first novel, Watermelon, in 1995, Keyes has been a fixture on the bestseller lists. One careless remark at Johnny’s birthday party, with the entire family present, starts Cara spilling out all their secrets.

Grown Ups: An absorbing page-turner from Sunday Times Grown Ups: An absorbing page-turner from Sunday Times

The Break was published in the autumn of 2017, and the abortion-prohibiting eighth amendment of the Irish constitution was repealed by a landslide vote the following spring. Grown Ups is as alive, complicated and chaotic as any real-life family, evoking extraordinary tenderness, pain and humour. One careless remark at Johnny's birthday party, with the entire family present, starts Cara spilling out all their secrets. As everything unravels, each of the adults finds themselves wondering if it's--finally--the time to grow up. She’s a prolific novelist as well as a beloved essayist, and even has a cookbook to her name – Saved By Cake is a funny and moving collection of recipes where the author opens up about how baking allowed her to get through a period of debilitating depression.

Keyes, who revels in miserable subjects and who has previously tackled drug addiction and domestic violence with the same lightness of touch, obsesses here over economics, the iniquity of the refugee crisis and millennial angst.