Paperback out in January 2023
“Three tense narratives comprise one powerful novel from one of Canada’s best storytellers.” - Toronto Star
Toronto Book Award shortlist - winner announced November 16 2022
THE RELATIVES
From the renowned author of Sweetness in the Belly, The Beauty of Humanity Movement and This Is Happy, comes a bold, urgent and richly imagined novel about what it means to be a family in our modern world.
Lila is on a long, painful journey toward motherhood. Tess and Emily are reeling after their ugly separation and fighting over ownership of the embryos that were supposed to grow their family together. And thousands of miles away, the unknown man who served as anonymous donor to them all is being held in captivity in Somalia. While his life remains in precarious balance, his genetic material is a source of both creation and conflict.
What does it mean to be a family in our rapidly shifting world? What are our responsibilities to each other with increasing options for how to create a family?
As these characters grapple with life-altering changes, they will find themselves interconnected in ways they cannot have imagined, and forced to redefine what family means to them.
—Doubleday Canada, publishers of This Is Happy
Listen to a clip from the audio book.
And an interview with Rhonda Douglas, for the Ottawa International Writers’ Festival here.