An incisive, skilful debut historical novel tracing the lives of a middle-aged woman and a teenaged girl through one pivotal year (1979-80) in North End Halifax.

It’s 1979, and June has raised her son, Gerald, into adulthood as an unwed mother. She is in middle life now, sandwiched between Gerald—who developmentally disabled and still lives in the family Hydrostone rowhouse—and her aging mother, Margie. When Gerald goes missing, it throws the family into chaos, leaving June shaken and open to the advances of a long-ago ex who’s back in Halifax and looking to reunite.

Teenaged Lulu, too, worries about Gerald’s absence from the pharmacy where she works. Lulu is reckoning with life as a girl transitioning into womanhood in this buttoned-up, patriarchal city. Her parents’ marriage is on the rocks, as is her relationship with her best friend now that they’ve started high school. Lulu will never be cool, will always be threatened by the rough boys who live in her neighbourhood, will always live in a body that feels unwieldy and undesirable.

The Nowhere Places puts the secret stories of girlhood and womanhood—sexual violence, accidental pregnancy, shame, ambition, and yearning—centre stage, as they occur in the wild insecurity and shifting sands of Lulu’s teenage life, and the powerful, decisive growth of June’s middle age.

Lulu and June, though divided by decades, are both learning who they are and who they belong to—and what they might be capable of in a world still deeply unfair to women. And both find their solid foundations in their patched-together families, and the safe joy of female friends.