Lorne Elliott is at his satirical best in his new novel A Few White Lies. Thea, the whip-smart, feisty, resourceful, and haiku-writing teenage narrator, joins the roster of memorably high-spirited and young female protagonists from Matilda to Lisa Moore's Flannery Malone. Thea flies from Haida Gwaii, where she lives with her café-owning mother, to St. John's. Her heroic ordeal is to help her ever-floundering, musician-songwriter father, Grady Jordan, drive a purple limousine, which he claims he won at cards, across Canada. Long estranged from her unreliable father, and possessing both caustic wit and principled integrity, Thea must contend with his spurious schemes and uproarious confabulations. En route, they become enmeshed with Chuck T, a scurrilous and menacing country rock musician, an Indigenous land protest and its media circus, and an opportunistic music star, Daisy Ratzinger, idolized by Thea's best friend, Marcia. En route, like voyageurs before them, Thea and Grady navigate the rapids and rocks of their relationship, struggling to paddle in synch.

Lorne Elliott's deep and loving knowledge of Canada, and of our music scene, permeates this road-trip novel with its reversal of parent-child roles. His satire, this time channeled exquisitely through Thea's voice, mind, and spirit, is, as always, compassionately and poignantly humane and laugh-out-loud hilarious.

Canadian-born writer, humourist, storyteller, and musician Lorne Elliott started performing in 1972 as a folk musician while attending Memorial University of Newfoundland. He is known for his one-man concert performance, The Lorne Elliott Music and Comedy Show: "The Collected Mistakes,” and for "Madly Off In All Directions," the CBC Radio comedy series which he wrote, hosted, and taped in concerts across Canada. It was greeted with such enthusiastic audience response that it went on for eleven seasons until it wrapped up in fall 2006. Lorne has written several plays including The Night The Racoons Went Berserk, which won the Best New Play Award at the Quebec Drama Festival 1983 and was produced at the Charlottetown Theatre Festival in 1986. Culture Shock has been produced several times and has been filmed by CBC TV. Other plays include The Pelley Papers, A Pitiful Ambition, How I Broke into Showbiz, and Tourist Trap. He has also written screenplays and TV comedies, skits, and revues, and has produced comedy variety shows for CBC TV, including "What Else is On" and "Lorne Elliott's Really Rather Quite Half-Decent TV Special." When not on tour, Lorne divides his time between homes in Quebec and Prince Edward Island.

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