Where We Have to Go

About Where We Have to Go

Set in Toronto throughout the 1990s, Lauren Kirshner's Where We Have to Go is a luminous and sassy first novel about the last days of childhood in a family coming apart at the seams. At once wryly humorous and deeply affecting, it follows the coming-of-age of the irresistible Lucy Bloom as she questions the limits of unconditional love, grows "criminally thin" as she stops eating, and discovers complicated truths about what it means to be a young woman. Kirshner's enchanting debut vividly reminds us that sometimes the most difficult journey is the one that takes us home.

Read an excerpt

About the Author

Lauren Kirshner is the author of Where We Have to Go (McClelland & Stewart, 2009). The novel has been published in translation in the Netherlands and Germany, and was selected as the One Book, One Brant title for 2010.

Kirshner is a graduate of the University of Toronto's Masters in English in the Field of Creative Writing, where she was mentored by Margaret Atwood. Her short stories, arts reviews, and poetry have appeared in such publications as the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, NOW magazine, the Hart House Review, and Exile. Her creative non-fiction piece "Twenty Poems for Claudia" was published in the paper documentary I Live Here. In 2009, Kirshner founded Sister Writes, a creative writing workshop for marginalized women in Toronto's downtown west end.

Recently named NOW magazine's Best Emerging Local Author, Lauren Kirshner lives in Toronto, where she is at work on her second novel.