Tumble Turns

Comedian Meg Riddoch is what she calls “borderline famous”—the sort of celebrity you recognize, though often without quite knowing from where. The sort who goes on an international stand-up tour, traveling between Canada and Australia while trying to survive canapé dinners and celebrity canoeing tournaments. She fills in the As to gossip magazines’ Qs and might just end up on their covers—sometimes in the context of the smart-spy-chick pilot she is helping to develop, but more often on the morning after certain late-night indiscretions. She is cool under pressure and friendly under the influence—though a little less so under fire, even if only of paintball—and she has professional friends who help her navigate the enclosed world 15 feet above Calgary streets.

But don’t let her quick wit and brave face fool you. Back home, Meg’s relationship with Murray is cloudy with a chance of ending, and inside, Meg is only trying to survive. That’s what she learned all those years ago, as a child in Ireland during troubling times of revolution and violence. That’s where she learned her brave face. That’s where she learned to field strip a Sten in the dark, and that’s where her memory-dream of the Thompson Gunner comes from.

And as she shuttles back and forth between gigs and photoshoots and Make-a-Wish appearances and dentist appointments, as she develops her pilot pitch and tries to perfect her tumble turns in the pool, Meg’s life will start to quietly unravel, forcing her to confront her past and the darkness it contains if she wants to stop living under its shadow.

“Earls’ prolific oeuvre of 12 novels and two short-story collections has steadily built him an international reputation as a contemporary writer who makes comic yardage--from subtle irony to groan-out-loud gags--out of the emotional entanglements of decent men during episodes of self-evaluation and transformation.”
-Sydney Morning Herald

“Contemporary, cliché-free Australian fiction that is sure to have a very wide appeal.”
-The Australian

“Earls paints the battle of the sexes as a friendly duel with plenty of promising common ground, and readers should enjoy this amiable, well-crafted and genuinely romantic book.”
-Publishers Weekly on “Perfect Skin”

“Nick Earls is on a literary trail trodden by J.D. Salinger . . . Where this at times very funny and insistently poignant novel achieves its momentum is in the careful pacing of character and slow release of emotions.”
-The Age on “Monica Bloom”