Little Monsters

By: Adrienne Brodeur

Narrated by: Stephen Graybill, Matt Pittenger, Cassandra Campbell, Joy Osmanski, Allyson Ryan, Sura Siu

Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins

Publisher's summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

A riveting novel about Cape Cod, complicated families and long-buried secrets

Ken and Abby Gardner were raised in a remote home on Cape Cod. As adults, their relationship is strained, but their lives are still deeply intertwined. Ken is a successful businessman with political ambitions and a picture-perfect family, but when his wife walks in on him in an internet chatroom, she demands they go to therapy. Abby is a talented artist who depends on her brother's goodwill, in part because he owns the studio where she lives and works.

Their father, Adam, a brilliant oceanographer, raised them as a single parent. As his seventieth birthday approaches and he begins to stare down his mortality, he comes off his bipolar disorder medication in order to make one last scientific breakthrough; he has secretly stopped taking his pills, which he knows will infuriate his children.

Meanwhile, Abby and Ken are both harbouring secrets of their own, and there is a new person on the periphery of the family - Steph, who doesn't make her connection known.

Set over one fraught summer, Little Monsters is an absorbing, sharply observed family story by a writer who knows Cape Cod inside and out - its Edenic lushness and its snakes.

©2023 Adrienne Brodeur (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

'Gorgeous, gripping, I couldn't put it down. Adrienne Brodeur does family intrigue and dysfunction like no one else I know. In Little Monsters, she once again draws back the curtain on a world of seaside wealth and casual privilege, to reveal a family unravelled by the lies, rivalries, secrets, and silences that have bound it together.' (Ruth Ozeki)

'Beautiful, lyrical and unvarnished, Adrienne Brodeur's Little Monsters delivers its powerful emotional punches so subtly that they sneak up on you and leave you floored.' (Miranda Cowley Heller, New York Times bestselling author of The Paper Palace)

'Gorgeously told, with psychological nuance to spare, Adrienne Brodeur's latest fiction returns us to a world she knows by heart, wind-blown, wave-swept Cape Cod and the fraught, labyrinthine territory beneath the surface of family. This is the work of a seasoned and wonderfully wise storyteller. Brodeur is as masterfully attuned to the complex DNA of kindred secrets and high-risk loyalties as she is empathetic to the specifically tangled lives of the Gardner clan. We ultimately want for them what we want for ourselves, the freedom that comes with hard-won healing and truth telling, and the intimacy that waits if we're brave enough to look back down the loaded barrel of love.' (Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife and When the Stars Go Dark)