**Named NOW Magazineβs Best Emerging Local Author
Where We Have to Go** is a luminous and sassy first novel about the last days of childhood in a family coming apart at the seams. At once wryly humorous and deeply affecting, this sparkling novel follows the irresistible Lucy Bloom as she searches for her place in the world.
When we first meet Lucy, sheβs an imaginative eleven-year-old dreaming of a taste of freedom β and only beginning to grasp that all is not well between her parents. In the years that follow, Lucyβs journey to adulthood will see her question the limits of unconditional love, grow βcriminally thinβ as she stops eating, and discover complicated truths about what it means to be a young woman. Through it all, the central figure in Lucyβs life remains her mother, Joy, whose larger-than-life stories and boisterous voice belie a deep disappointment. As their relationship is tested again and again, Lucy comes to understand the resilience of the bonds that tie us to the ones we love.
Among the characters we meet are Lucyβ s father, Frank, a failed glamour photographer turned travel agent whoβs never been out of the country; her best friend, Erin, an artist whose outspoken iconoclasm will inspire and challenge Lucy; and Crashing Wave, Frankβs lover, a former exotic dancer and the woman Lucy comes to imagine as the ideal of all that is feminine.
Set in Toronto throughout the 1990s, Where We Have to Go is a novel of self-discovery, family, and love. It introduces Lauren Kirshner as one of our most striking new voices, and reminds us that sometimes the most difficult journey is the one that takes us home.