Things Go Flying — Shari Lapena

Received an honourable mention on the Globe and Mail''s top first fiction for 2008

Shari Lapena takes the wit of David Sedaris and the outrageousness of Douglas Coupland to create a dark, hilarious and wildly inventive contemporary comedy about how the past can come back to haunt you. Literally.

In Things Go Flying, Harold Walker is desperately average and listless at mid-life, stemming in part from the abrupt death of his one-time best friend, Tom. Harold''s wife Audrey, an increasingly frustrated housewife and mother to their two teenage sons, is a control freak silently harbouring an explosive secret. Things go flying in the Walker household when Harold''s long-deceased mother comes back to haunt them. He finds he has her gift for opening the door to the past-and if there was ever a gift he wanted to return, it''s this one! Audrey is similarly terrified-how is she to safeguard her secret now? If she can''t control this world, how is she to control the next one? And how will she protect her good china? Harold, who has made a practice of avoiding things all his life, must confront two problems-how to find meaning in this life, and how to come to grips with the mostly terrifying idea that life just might go on forever!