From the brilliant mind of Governor General’s Award finalist and author Claudia Dey, a mother’s disappearance in a remote northern territory sets off an examination of what led to that fateful day
In an imagined remote northern territory in 1985, an unknown woman falls out of an open car door into the arms of The Heavy, a man as lonely as he is quiet. When she disappears fifteen years later, Billie Jean is still an outsider in this town of fewer than four hundred people. The attempt to trace her movements before she disappeared reveals the mysteries of the human heart. The story is told from three points of view: in the poignant voice of her daughter, fifteen-year-old Pony Darlene, a girl struggling with being a teen in the middle of nowhere; the clear-eyed observations of her beloved canine companion, to whom she cannot tell a lie; and the popular, secretive Supes, the teenage boy longing to be average who is her lover.
Heartbreaker is a storytelling tour de force about the lies we tell ourselves and others, and how the truth will always find its way out no matter what the consequences.