Breaking and Entering

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

During the hottest summer on record, Bea's dangerous new hobby puts everyone's sense of security to the test.

At 49, Beatrice Billings is rudderless. Her marriage is stale, her relationship with her son Thomas is strained, she carries on ongoing arguments with her older sister in her head, and her mother is in the early stages of dementia. Bea misses the momentum she remembers from in her thirties, when she and everyone she knew was buying houses, having children, and renovating kitchens. But when Bea discovers that she has both a talent and a passion for picking locks, the sense of anticipation that had been missing from her life returns. Breaking into other peoples houses is something shes good at: she is a quick study, subtle, discreet, and never greedy. It's a dangerous hobby that makes her feel aliveand so she begins the guilty analysis of other peoples lives, and eventually, her own. From Governor General's Award-winning Don Gillmor, Breaking and Entering is an exacting look at the fragility of all the things we take on faith.

Reviews

Praise for Breaking and Entering

"A devastating and droll portrait of middle age that will be instantly recognizable to the 'sandwich generation,' stuck between kids and parents, and just generally stuck. It's a period of life that makes you want to do crazy things, and the only escape is other people."
Stephen Marche, author of On Writing and Failure

Praise for Don Gillmor

To The River: Losing My Brother is haunting, beautifully written and rightly hesitant about any certainties regarding an act as ultimately unknowable in social terms as it is in individual decisions.
Brian Bethune, Macleans

Gillmor took on the thankless, though compelling, existential task of understanding another mans life, happiness and grief. And what makes it worth leaving.
Globe and Mail

As he explores the cultural, sociological and psychological questions surrounding suicide, Gillmor circles ever closer to an answer to the central question of those left behind: Why On the way, he draws back the curtain on a subject too little discussed ... At its heart, though, To the River is a family story, focused on a brothers love and loss. It is a keen-edged, frank book, beautiful and unflinching, painful and important.
Robert J. Wiersema, author of Seven Crow Stories

A beautiful, shattering book. Wise and honest, and exquisitely written. Insight for anyone who has known the gnawing sorrow or the endless accusation of a senseless loss. It will also make you laugh out loud. Go figure.
Linden MacIntyre, Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author of The Bishops Man

Author Bio

Don Gillmor is the author of To the River, which won the Governor Generals Award for non-fiction. He is the author of three novels: Long Change, Mount Pleasant, and Kanata. He is also the author of a two-volume history of Canada, Canada: A Peoples History, and has written nine books for children, two of which were nominated for a Governor Generals Award. He was a senior editor at Walrus magazine, and his journalism has appeared in Rolling Stone, GQ, Walrus, Saturday Night, Toronto Life, the Globe and Mail, and the Toronto Star. He has won twelve National Magazine Awards and numerous other honours. He lives in Toronto.