The Full Catastrophe - by Méira Cook (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Winner, 2023 Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction

Finalist, 2023 McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award

A compassionate and funny novel about defining yourself, the communities that support us, and the journeys that secrets propel.

Charlie Minkoff, a thirteen-year-old boy born with intersex traits, would be happy to be left alone. Living with his artist mother in a derelict loft in downtown Winnipeg, perpetually wondering about the father who abandoned him, and tormented in school because of his differences, Charlie navigates the assorted catastrophes of his life. He's helped along by the love of his beloved grandfather, Oscar, and the makeshift family who surround him: his mother's best friend; a couple of elderly shut-in neighbours; a mysterious girl in his class who has secrets of her own; and his desperately needy and perpetually hungry dog, Gellman.

When a school project leads him to discover that Oscar never had a bar mitzvah, Charlie decides to right the historical wrong and arrange a belated ceremony. But this quest will be more than he bargained for, and meanwhile everyone from his doctor to his Ancestry Studies teacher keeps insisting that Charlie needs to learn to tell his own story.

Margaret Laurence Award winner Méira Cook's The Full Catastrophe is a story of psychological complexity, tenderness, and humour.

Review Quotes

"The Full Catastrophe reads like a tragi-comic film with a unique cast of characters." -- CBC Books

"The Full Catastrophe has characters as rich and multi-faceted as life itself." -- Prairie Books Now

"[The Full Catastrophe] challenges conventional ideas about adolescence, parenting and the experience of intersex children." -- Winnipeg Free Press

"Wit, wisdom, rhythm, emotional warmth, charm, and more fill the exuberant pages of Méira Cook's fourth novel." -- The Miramichi Reader