Lesley Crewe – författare

Born into a basket of clean sheets - ruining a perfectly good load of laundry - Emmeline never quite fit in on her family's rural Nova Scotian farm. After suffering multiple losses in the First World War, her family became so heavy with grief, toxicity, and mental illness that Emmeline felt their weight smothering her. And so, she fled across the Atlantic and built her life in England. Now she is retired and living in a small coastal town with her best friend, Vera, an excellent conversationalist. Vera is also a small white dog, and so Emmeline is making an effort to talk to more humans. When she joins a memoir-writing course at the library, her classmates don't know what to make of her. Funny, loud, and with a riveting memoir, she charms the lot.As her past unfolds for her audience, friendships form, a bonus in a rather lonely life. She even shares with them her third-biggest secret: she has liberated hundreds of spoons over her lifetime - from the local library, Cary Grant, Winston Churchill. She is a compulsive spoon stealer.When Emmeline unexpectedly inherits the farm she grew up on, she knows she needs to leave her new friends and go see the farm and what remains of her family one last time. She arrives like a tornado in their lives, an off-kilter Mary Poppins bossing everyone around and getting quite a lot wrong. But with her generosity and hard-earned wisdom, she gets an awful lot right too. A pinball ricocheting between people, offending and inspiring in equal measure, Emmeline, in her final years, believes that a spoonful - perhaps several spoonfuls - of kindness can set to rights the family so broken by loss and secrecy. The Spoon Stealer is a classic Crewe book: full of humour, family secrets, women's friendship, lovable animals, and immense heart.

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".

This novel by Lesley Crewe brings readers to 1960s Montreal and features a nosy would-be child detective searching for the truth about her mother.It's 1967 in Montreal, the Expo is in full swing, and Audrey Parker has just moved with her dad to Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, a whole new neighbourhood full of different kinds of people to spy on. Audrey is a lot of things: articulate, disarming, forthright. And, as her father reminds her often, indecently nosy.Audrey scribbles every observation down in her notebooks - from which foods her new teacher eats for lunch, to how blue the water is in Greece, to what time the one-legged man across the street gets home. She is certain she will soon root out a murderer or uncover a mystery. But there's only one mystery that really matters to her: her mother. Who was she? How did she die? Why won't her father ever talk about her?Over a year of Audrey's life, we bike with her through the streets of NDG, encountering stray animals, free-range kids, and adults both viciously cruel and wonderful. And we walk with Audrey across the threshold from childhood to adolescence, where she will discover the truth about her mother.Balancing humour and sadness as expertly as ever, author Lesley Crewe - who has so often captured Cape Breton perfectly on the page - turns her incisive observations for the first time to the NDG of the 1960s, where she grew up.

This novel by Lesley Crewe follows a mystery author with writer's block from 1950s Montreal to rural Cape Breton, in search of much more than her next big story.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 Edith, 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 lov letter to the women who have always kept the kettles warm and the neighbours fed in rural Cape Breton.

Bestselling author Lesley Crewe's new novel explores widowhood, complicated family dynamics, and growing up at any age.Well, Dick's dead. Now what? Margo, his widow, is trying to dodge the tsunami of paperwork coming her way. She doesn't want to deal with the details - why do you think she was married in the first place? Dick always handled the drudgery. Monty, Margo's ex-husband (the first one, not the dead one), is trying to support Margo - who seems to be finally entering adulthood at the tender age of sixty-two. Their daughter Julia knows Margo needs her, but between work complications, house complications, and genius-yet-useless son complications, Julia's gasping for air already. Dead Dick's ex-wife Carole and their daughter Velma consider a Margo a maneater thanks to a few long-ago indiscretions, so the funeral is a nightmare. Life in New Brunswick lately is a tornado of siblings, children, pets, marriages, health issues, and endless bureaucracies.And at the centre of it all is Margo, living alone for the very first time, trying to endure everyone else's judgements about the woman she is when she doesn't even know herself. Maybe a cat will help. (The cat doesn't help.)How old do you have to be to come of age?....and has anyone seen Dick's will?With humour and heart, Lesley Crewe walks readers through the incredibly disruptive domino effects of the death of one unremarkable man.