The Best Thing For You [Paperback]

Annabel Lyon's first book, Oxygen, received a great deal of attention for its flashy, dark, urbane stories. The Best Thing for You, a considerably heftier volume that collects three recent novellas, makes good on the promise of her debut. It shows Lyon expanding her range and pushing her sense of character while stripping and refining her writing. It's great stuff.

Lyon's opening novella, "No Fun," is a study of violence and family squabbles in suburban Vancouver. It is followed with "The Goldberg Metronome," a classy set piece that traces a Charles Rennie Mackintosh-designed metronome backward in time, through the turmoil of 1930s Germany to its origins, and forward again to its discovery under a sink in contemporary Vancouver. Both are genuinely interesting and well-told stories, but it's the final novella, "The Best Thing for You," that is the star of the collection. Lyon begins with a flourish, pushing the line that divides writing from over-writing:

The idea first came to her one limpid yellow morning toward the end of the war, as she sat across the breakfast table from her husband, watching him chew with toast-textured jaws. The minutes were falling down like dominoes, and she had a full day planned once he had left for the eight-fifteen, so that the idea had at first seemed negligible, a silver coin of a lake glimpsed from the window seat of an airplane, easy to forget.

"The Best Thing for You" is a murder-ballad in novella form, complete with a bored young housewife, a complicit butcher's boy, made-for-cinema crowd sequences, and a gifted young teenager who takes an interest in the aftermath. Set in the WASPish Vancouver of the Second World War, the novella draws much of its menace from writing that only occasionally plunges into flashiness. Lyon achieves something very unusual here, a mannered English that could only have come from British Columbia, that employs phrases like "bright as a gewgaw" without feeling affected. "The Best Thing for You" could well stand alone, and it is certainly the best piece of writing here. There is, however, a satisfying unity to these three novellas, which only adds to the pleasures of a fine collection by a shockingly talented author. --Jack Illingworth

“Here is yearning, transgression, lust, and all the consequences. Lyon’s writing is immaculately clean and driven. These novellas bristle with heat and blood-rushing suspense. Characters wholly unexpected and eerily familiar, sharply felt. Lyon is a dazzling stylist. Here is mastery.” 
–Lisa Moore, author The Giller Prize finalist Open

“Annabel Lyon has no fear: she trains a stark moral searchlight on the snakiest of human dilemmas, while at the same time bestowing upon her characters a tender, tough-minded intelligence that yields fierce insights into the teeth-rattling nature of love. Fetchingly reasonable, stylishly original, these three perfectly poised novellas signal that the form is brilliantly alive and most excellently kicking.”
–Elise Levine, author Requests and Dedications

“Annabel Lyon’s writing is fresh, unexpected and truthful. These three tales explore how we talk to each other and what we notice changing in those we love. Her delivery is savvy, succinct and wondrous.”
–Michael Winter, author This All Happened

Annabel Lyon’s debut book of fiction, Oxygen, “left the country’s literary elite breathless” (Elm Street magazine). Now, in The Best Thing for You, Lyon has taken her tough, unflinching style to new heights and all the anticipation is rewarded.

Here, in three novellas, Lyon reveals the potential for darkness that lurks behind even the most perfect-seeming veneer. In the first novella, “No Fun,” a middle-class family in present-day Vancouver is thrown into turmoil when their teenage son is charged in connection with the beating of a disabled man. In “The Goldberg Metronome,” a young couple discovers an antique metronome taped up and hidden under a sink in their new apartment. Its dark past weaves a story that crosses centuries and continents. Then, in the stunning title novella, a riveting and layered film-noirish piece set in wartime 1940s Vancouver, a housewife in her twenties plots and carries out her husband’s murder with sang-froid, with the help of her lover, a young grocery-store clerk. Later, the son of the insurance agent who loses his job over the woman’s claim must deal with his family’s financial downfall as he nurses his own obsession with her crime and its connection to the music in his head.

Lyon draws us in with her vivid characters and sharp, highly charged prose and holds us in the worlds she creates. Along the way, she challenges the fragile illusion of goodness in our lives. Once again Annabel Lyon has demonstrated herself to be one of Canada’s boldest, most exciting new voices.

Annabel Lyon’s first book of fiction, Oxygen (2000), a collection of short stories, was published to wide acclaim. Her short fiction has appeared in Toronto Life, The Journey Prize Anthology, and Write Turns: New Directions in Canadian Fiction. She is also a frequent contributor to the Vancouver Sun and the Globe and Mail. In addition to creative writing, Annabel Lyon has studied music, philosophy, and law. She lives in Vancouver, where she writes full time.