Beneficiary

A novel about what it means to face the world as a woman on her own terms from the award-winning author of The Textbook of the Rose and An Honest Woman.

Seren was doomed to a country club cage and a leash of pearls until out of the blue on a Tuesday night in 1969, she found herself suddenly saying “no.” More than fifty years later, she looks back on her life and each choice that followed, beautiful, tragic and completely her own.

Leaving her family for the freedom of the 1970s, Seren began a quest to discover how to live in this world as her true self—a quest that would take her from the heady countercultural milieu of communal houses on Vancouver Island through marriage and motherhood, divorce, and an unexpected inheritance that changed everything. Suddenly wealthy, Seren must wrestle with money, with class, and what it means to have more than most.

What does it mean to live truly, through tragedy and heartbreak? How do we create ourselves in a world that keeps changing? What does it mean to have money when so many people don’t? A richly written, fiercely feminist novel imbued with real bravery, Beneficiary weaves the past and the present in a rich tapestry of life.

JoAnn McCaig is the author of The Textbook of The Rose and An Honest Woman. She is the proud owner of Shelf Life Books, an independent bookstore in her hometown of Calgary, AB.

A gritty contemporary upside-down King Lear. Set in a Western city, the main character isn’t the business tycoon father, but the rebellious daughter who rejects the world of wealth and privilege her father and sister thrive in. Until her father leaves her the bulk of his estate and she is forced to contend with how to love and be loved as a person of privilege in a world where too many are suffering.

—Roberta Rees, award-winning author of Eyes Like Pigeons and Beneath the Faceless Mountain

Meet Seren, a woman of razor sharp intelligence and humour to match, as she confronts the world around her, whether that be the world of nature, of single-motherhood, of a refugee camp, or of her very privileged family. In this searing engagement with modern life no one is let off the hook, least of all Seren herself. Raw, at times downright squirmy in its unflinching gaze, at other times hilariously angry, often deeply and thoughtfully loving, Beneficiary is always, always compelling. You will miss Seren after you’ve turned the last page, and you will not forget her. In Beneficiary, McCaig is at the top of her game. The book is structurally brilliant, but it’s Seren who will captivate: witty, complex, flawed, shining in her uniqueness.

—Barbara Joan Scott, author of The Taste of Hunger and The Quick

Vibrant, raw, funny and poignant, Beneficiary tells the uncensored story of Seren, a woman who chafes at the expectations her gender and privilege impose as she struggles through the challenges and joys of singledom and motherhood to live a life that is unabashedly genuine, unapologetically her own.

—Joan Crate, author of Black Apple