Andrew Ladd

*the author, not the hockey player

What Ends

An impressive family saga... Beautifully handled.
★★★★ The Sunday Telegraph

Set on a remote Scottish island, this is the compelling story of one family's struggle to cope with a vanishing way of life.

On Eilean Fior, a small island of just twenty-eight inhabitants off the north-west coast of Scotland, the McClouds run a faltering guesthouse. A family business, it is expected that one of the three children will eventually take over. But Barry, Flora and Trevor all have their own ideas.

This nuanced and moving debut weaves together a series of narratives which follow each of the McClouds as they struggle to find a balance between their feelings of obligation and their own desires. At once a lyrically haunting elegy for a lost world, What Ends is also a subtle family saga about change, regret, and growing old.

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More praise for What Ends

Ladd's prose is simple, lyrical, given free rein to explore a family saga that feels a lot fuller than might be expected from a 250-page novel... It's a touching and precise examination of the family dynamic.
★★★★ The Skinny
Ladd draws the reader into their outwardly small lives to show layer after layer of complexity... a heady read.
The Daily Mail
What Ends is about the ambiguity of the bonds that relate us to people and places and bring meaning to our lives... Andrew Ladd's success lies in how he induces the reader to relate to these moments of quiet beauty in the same way we relate to them in life: in the knowledge that they will end.
Times Literary Supplement
A poignant and touching melancholy suffuses the small moments in this lyrical... bittersweet coming-of-age tale.
Publishers Weekly
An intriguing, understated debut.
We Love This Book
A quietly profound debut.
Largehearted Boy
Ladd reminds me of a twenty-first-century Neil Gunn... This downbeat tale will also appeal to readers of Thomas Hardy's elegiac novels; it is an atmospheric and carefully textured tragedy that is hard to shake off once you've read it. What Ends is a moving and auspicious debut.
The Bottle Imp
Ladd plays with our expectations as readers as he reveals multifaceted characters through cleverly intertwining perspectives. The novel quietly builds to a sort of anti-climax - the depopulating of the island - and is worth reading if only to get to the last, poignant section from George's point of view.
Full Stop
Immersing and mellow, with smooth, beautiful writing and characters to savor as they grow and change.
Boston Bibliophile
To watch the McClouds grow and evolve over the years is both heartwarming and heartbreaking... What Ends is an important missive on the need for letting go, and the joy in letting things pass.
The Western Herald
What Ends is an exquisitely conjured eulogy for a vanishing way of life. Andrew Ladd's wise and vital voice is descended from Flaubert by way of William Trevor. His sentences mesmerize, beckon as if from another time. This is no debut but a masterwork, an absorbing micro-saga whose completion we mourn. What Ends reminds us of all a novel can be.
Claire Vaye Watkins, author of Gold Fame Citrus
A remarkable, haunting novel.
Kathryn Davis, author of Duplex
Each of the McClouds is rendered with a vivid complexity and it is that vividness which makes What Ends so truly suspenseful and so deeply satisfying... A sparkling and eloquent debut.
Margot Livesey, author of The Road from Belhaven
What Ends is the rare debut by a writer whose work you know you'll be reading for many years.
Ladette Randolph, author of Private Way
A wonderful book.
Danielle Trussoni, author of Angelology
A quietly sweeping debut.
Steve Himmer, author of Scratch

What Ends is available in print and as an ebook.

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Awards

Association of Writers and Writing Programs Prize in the Novel

Winner • See the full list of winners

New York Public Library Young Lions Award

Finalist • See the full list of finalists

Center for Fiction Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Award

Longlist • See the full longlist

Balcones Fiction Prize

Finalist

Amazon.com Breakthrough Novel Award

Semifinalist