That and her proclamation that she has hidden treasure in the house and the king's ransom will go to whoever loved her most. When someone threatens Aunt Hildy, she responds with her trademark sass: "Go ahead. Shoot me. I dare you.

Shoot Me

Crewe, Lesley

Literature & Fiction

Vagrant Press

From the author of Relative Happiness and Shoot Me comes a riveting story about one terrible secret-a secret kept in shame, buried deep for self-preservation, and exposed in a moment that changes forever the lives of everyone involved. Ava Harris is a famous actress living the life of the rich and fabulous in L.A. when a family crisis calls her home. It's been ten years since she's set foot in Glace Bay, Cape Breton- back when she was plain old Libby MacKinnon. Why she ran away, no one knows. Returning home, she must face her family, her friends, and her first love, Seamus O'Reilly, whose heart broke the day she left. Ava is a good little actress, determined that no one will know what happened. She will keep the truth buried at all costs-even if she has to run again. But secrets have a way of surfacing, especially in a small town, and love has a way of blasting through the toughest barriers. While Ava can never go home again, perhaps Libby finally can.

Ava Comes Home

Literary

Nimbus Pub Ltd

First released in 2005 as one of Vagrant Press's inaugural titles, Lesley Crewe's debut novel, Relative Happiness, garnered rave reviews. Lesley's writing is fresh and funny, and her portrayal of the Cape Breton spirit―strong and wry in the face of adversity―is unwaveringly authentic. Reviews for Relative Happiness:"Against the backdrop of Cape Breton's windy beaches, author Lesley Crewe delivers real people living real lives. We give her our highest kudo: we couldn't put the book down." -Aloft Magazine "The novel is quite exceptional and shows that Crewe has the potential to become a leading author within this genre." -New Brunswick Reader "This is Crewe's first novel and quite frankly, I'm astonished to know that. Her graceful prose and her ability to turn a familiar story into something with such raw, dramatic power are skills that many veteran novelists have yet to develop." -Halifax Chronicle Herald

Relative Happiness

Parenting & Relationships

Linda, Bette, Gemma, and Augusta are four lifelong friends who live in Montreal. This year they're all going to turn fifty, so they decide to take a trip to New York together (courtesy of Linda's philandering husband's Visa Platinum). But at the LaGuardia airport washroom, Bette accidentally switches bags with a young mother who's actually smuggling diamonds for the mob, and things start going terribly wrong. When they kill an aggressive cab driver with pepper spray, the four friends know this is not going to be the trip of shopping and Broadway shows they'd expected. A series of miscommunications and mishaps entangles the friends even further into the criminal underworld of New York. But out of all the bad luck (Linda's husband is staying at the same hotel as the friends, with his new girlfriend) and bad people (mobsters, drug addicts, and Linda's husband) emerge four fifty-year-old avengers of truth and justice. In the style of Crewe's Shoot Me, Hit and Mrs. is a wildly entertaining comedic romp.

Hit & Mrs.

Humor & Satire

From best-selling author Lesley Crewe comes a poignant and moving novel.
Sisters Bay and Tansy are complete opposites. Widowed mother Bay has never lived anywhere but Louisbourg; restless Tansy left the town as a a teenager and stayed away for years.
And now, Tansy is home. Home, and unwittingly falling in love with her sister's almost-boyfriend. Home, and befriending Ashley when all Bay can do is fight with her teenaged daughter. Home, and desperately hiding the real reason she fled all those years ago.
When crisis hits the family, the sisters draw closer. But the closer they are, the more explosive their relationship, and soon their troubled history threatens to shatter what's left of their family forever.
Complex and heartwarming, Her Mother's Daughter is an exploration of family and friends and the tangled skeins of love, mistakes, and secrets twisting between us all.

Her Mother's Daughter

Nimbus Publishing (CN)

A new smaller format of Lesley Crewe's second novel, now with a reader's guide and author interview.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."

Genre Fiction

From the author of Relative Happiness and Shoot Me comes a riveting story about one terrible secret—a secret kept in shame, buried deep for self-preservation, and exposed in a moment that changes forever the lives of everyone involved.Ava Harris is a famous actress living the life of the rich and fabulous in L.A. when a family crisis calls her home. It's been ten years since she's set foot in Glace Bay, Cape Breton—back when she was plain old Libby MacKinnon. Why she ran away, no one knows. Returning home, she must face her family, her friends, and her first love, Seamus O'Reilly, whose heart broke the day she left.Ava is a good little actress, determined that no one will know what happened. She will keep the truth buried at all costs—even if she has to run again. But secrets have a way of surfacing, especially in a small town, and love has a way of blasting through the toughest barriers. While Ava can never go home again, perhaps Libby finally can.

Traditions, created, and subverted. Love, nurtured and destroyed. Friendships, marriages, and the wild beauty of Cape Breton Island. And above all, kin, in all its convoluted forms. In Kin, bestselling author Lesley Crewe traces the tangled lines of loyalty, tragedy, joy, and love through three generations of families. Beginning with Annie Macdonald, an effervescent seven-year-old living in Glace Bay in the 1930s, and ending with Annie's great-niece Hilary, an idealistic twenty-year-old in Round Island in 2000, the story is complex and riveting. The cast of characters is vast and varied-some with the island's deliciously cutting wit, some dour and uptight, some frail, some resilient, and all inextricably bound by their shared histories. Brimming with humour and poignancy, Kin is a celebration of the heartbreaking, maddening joy that is family.

Chloe Sparrow is a twenty-five-year-old TV producer with a hit show on her hands. The Single Guy is a popular new reality series, where dozens of women are trying to woo bachelor veterinarian Austin Hawke. As the filming gets underway, though, accident-prone Chloe finds herself in one predicament after another: a wayward puck hits her in the face during a hockey game, she sprains her ankle at a dude ranch, and she falls out of a boat at high speed. But Chloe has bigger problems. The stress of her home life with her nutty but loveable Gramps and Aunt Ollie is getting to her, her job is consuming her, and painful memories from her past threaten to overwhelm her. To top it off, her co-worker Amanda is pressuring her to find a boyfriend. It doesn't take long before Chloe realizes that not having all her wishes come true might not be such a bad idea.

Chloe Sparrow

Lexie Ivy loves her little house in Cape Breton, her big family, and the endless sea that surrounds her. She wouldn't trade her life for anything, but at thirty she's starting to feel like something's missing. Enter Adrian, a charming backpacker who takes a wrong turn at the U.S. border and ends up on Lexie's doorstep, and Joss, an irresistible man who disappears just as quickly as he arrives. Lexie's peaceful life has suddenly become more complicated than she ever imagined. Lesley Crewe's funny, whip-smart debut novel brims with Cape Breton-style humour. Filled with heartache without succumbing to it, Relative Happiness is the story of life and love in a small town, of four sisters who love, betray, and rescue each other in turn, and of Lexie Ivy's joyful awakening. To be released as a feature film in 2015.

Relative Happiness (movie edition)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Crewe, Lesley. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Crewe, Lesley

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Crewe, Lesley. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Shoot Me

Ava Comes Home

Relative Happiness

Hit & Mrs.

Her Mother's Daughter

Shoot Me

Ava Comes Home

Kin

Chloe Sparrow

Relative Happiness (movie edition)