Terry Fallis, two time winner of the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, is back this week with the release of his sixth novel.

Fallis is no stranger to Lennox & Addington County. He was the guest of honour at the library’s inaugural Author Gala, where we celebrated No Relation, his fourth book and our first One Book, One L&A community read. Since then, he released Poles Apart in 2015, a novel about a man who is secretly behind a popular feminist blog, and now One Brother Shy, his new novel about a man dealing with a big family secret.

If you have read and enjoyed other Terry Fallis books, you’ll appreciate this one just the same. 

Like his previous books, One Brother Shy is a fun and witty, plot-driven read featuring a likeable underdog undergoing a transformation. We meet Alex MacAskill, a painfully shy software engineer from Kanata, Ontario. He’s so shy that he can barely make eye contact with his colleagues or talk much outside of his own head. Side note: the voice inside his head is actually quite witty, providing the levity required for what might otherwise be seen as a dark story. It’s definitely not!

Alex works at a job that is barely tolerable thanks to his evil boss and then goes home to take care of his terminally ill mother – that’s his life. Things weren’t always so grim for Alex. We know from the beginning that there was an incident in his teenage years that is responsible for him becoming a recluse; an incident so scarring that a decade later he still attends twice weekly therapy sessions. You don’t find out what actually happened to him until well into the story, but you get the sense that it altered the course of his life.

One evening, he is talking with his mother, whose health is declining rapidly. She mentions that there is something she wants to discuss with him, but is too tired at the moment. The next morning, hoping to pick up the conversation where it left off, Alex discovers that his mother had died in the night. He discovers an envelope tucked behind her pillow that contains information that turns everything on its head. His mother is gone now, but now he knows he has family left – and he will travel to London, Moscow and back to track them down. The journey will help ultimately force him to confront his demons and move on with his life

If you have read and enjoyed other Terry Fallis books, you’ll appreciate this one just the same. It offers the same cheeky narration, the same sort of central character you can root for, and the same heartfelt conclusion. It also offers heaps of Canadiana!

You can reserve this title from your branch of the County of Lennox & Addington Libraries or online here.