From acclaimed Canadian novelist Billie Livingston comes this powerful U.S. debut that unfolds over a riveting dual narrative—an unforgettable story of ordinary lives rocked by hardship and scandal that follows in the tradition of Jennifer Haigh, A. Manette Ansay, and Jennifer Egan.


Ben wakes up in a hospital with a hole in his head he can't explain. What he can remember he’d rather forget. Like how he’d spend nights as a limo driver for the wealthy and debauched….READ MORE

Spiced with passion and humor, Grant Me the Serenity is the story of two sisters struggling to survive a battle with addiction as they fumble to piece together the fragments of their lives and find a way back home….READ MORE

The child of 2 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. READ MORE

A young misfit is assaulted by a delusional homeless man and subsequently finds herself caught in the middle of two bullying cops who invite her to hit back; an impulsive and restless mother hungers for independence but wants company along the way; a middle-aged man who yearns for a life off the grid rejects his family and heads into the woods with a young bohemian while he slowly loses his mind; a journalist questions her scruples and complicity after she is invited to visit a friend in New York who is in the midst of an affair with a married man. READ MORE

Vivian is late to her own mother’s funeral. Wearing a skintight lipstick-red suit, Vivian stands out like a pornographer’s dream amongst the raven collection of West Coast intellectuals mourning the untimely death of the famous feminist Josie Callwood. Self-medicating grief with vodka, Vivian can’t help trying to stick her finger in the eye of her dead mother’s expectations. READ MORE

A remarkable debut novel and bittersweet tale of the unflinching love and devotion between a mother and daughter.Razor sharp and darkly funny Going Down Swingingchronicles two years in the life of the Hoffmans. Eilleen Hoffman has just told Danny, her con-artist lover and father of her youngest daughter Grace, to get out — for good. Once a teacher, Eilleen lived a middle-class life, but her taste in men coupled with a predilection for pills and booze has brought her down. Desperate to prevent her family from sinking deeper into poverty, READ MORE

As a poet, Billie drives straight for the sharp edges--from the rough, self-assured and brash voice of a woman who poses nude at seventeen while considering the 40-year-old photographer as her guinea pig, to the confidante of relatives, and friends grappling with the tortured frustration of love, sexuality, adultery and death. READ MORE

Produced as Feature Film, “Sitting on the Edge of Marlene” (2014)

“… these two stories published in one volume will catch the attention of hi/lo readers.” —School Library Journal

“Teens who love gritty, real life stories with “what if?” situations are sure to like these stories.” —CM Magazine

“… a fast-moving and intensely dark story. Kudos to Livingston for shedding light on a very dysfunctional situation that we all know exists, but refuse to acknowledge.”—theunexpectedtnt.com/