Exit Lines

**“Biting, sly, sardonic. . . Exit Lines is shot through with pathos, poignancy and insights about aging on virtually every page.” —The Gazette A subversive and deeply compassionate story of reaching for autonomy at the end of life, by the celebrated author of Gaining Ground.** The ageing and deep-pocketed residents of the Idyll Inn all have one thing in common: they’ve been left to live out the rest of their days at the pastel-hued “retirement lodge,” and no one is pleased. There’s Sylvia, whose steely backbone inspires fear in the Inn’s nosy administrators. Her icy solitude is soon thawed by an unexpected trio: George, Greta, and Ruth. Once a shoe store owner who had an affair with Greta—his former clerk—George is now wheelchair-bound and entirely unfiltered. Greta never recovered from becoming a widow as a young immigrant, and seeing George again evokes memories of their complicated romance. Ruth, also widowed, cheerfully reads morbid news aloud to her new friends, all while her own despondency deepens. As months pass, they drink too much, find new ways to defy authority, and mock the Inn’s infantilizing extracurricular activities. Little do Ruth’s companions know, they are about to be enlisted in a shocking task for which she needs their discretion—and their complicity. In her wry, unflinching style, Booker-longlisted author Joan Barfoot enchants with personalities as tender, angry, and flawed as they are human. Poignant yet bold, Exit Lines asks whether longing has an expiry date and what it might look like to live and die with dignity. Now deposited under the same roof by absent children, the former lovers are in a position to reflect on the consequences of their choices. Completing the newly formed coterie of friends is tiny Ruth Friedman, a retired Children’s Aid worker who keeps many of the city’s darkest secrets, and whose passionate late-in-life marriage to fellow social worker Bernard did not include children of their own. Now also widowed, her grief unfathomably deep, she has taken to cheerfully reading horrifying news stories aloud to her new friends, who are soon to discover that these daily doses of gloom are less for their edification than they are in service of a desperate project for which Ruth needs their complicity. In the wryly funny and wholly compassionate Exit Lines, acclaimed author Joan Barfoot once again treats her readers to an intimate encounter with some fascinating characters engaged in the fight of their lives. Sylvia, George, Greta and Ruth are at times tender, angry, hilarious and deeply flawed, but always utterly and captivatingly human. How do we treat the elderly in our lives? How do we intend to grow old ourselves? Will we ever come to the end of longing? Exit Lines brings to the surface these and other fundamental questions about the nature of life, and its closing.