Her 2012 novel, One Good Hustle, was long-listed for the Giller Prize and became a year’s best book selection for several publications including The Globe and Mail, Now Magazine and January Magazine. Greedy Little Eyes, a collection of short stories, was cited by The Globe and Mail and The Georgia Straight as one of the year's best books and the collection went on to win the CBC's Bookie Award as well as the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for Best Short Story Collection. Livingston's writing has been nominated for a National Magazine Award for journalism, the Journey Prize for fiction and the Pat Lowther Award for poetry. She went on to work varying lengths of time as a file clerk, receptionist, cocktail waitress, model, actor, chocolate sampler, and booth host at a plumber’s convention. Her first employment was filling the dairy coolers in a Macs Milk. Born in Hamilton, Ontario, she grew up in Toronto and Vancouver, and has since lived in Tokyo, Hamburg, Munich, Los Angeles and London, England. One Good Hustle chronicles two months in Sammie Bell's struggle with her dread that she is somehow doomed genetically to be just another hustler.īillie Livingston is a fiction writer, poet, and essayist. Sammie wants to be normal but fears that where she comes from makes that beyond the realm of possibility.
Throughout a long summer of crisis among the normals, Sammie is torn between her longing for the approval of the con-man father she was named for and her desire for the "weird, spearmint-fresh feeling" of life in the straight world. With her father missing in action, she has nowhere else to go but the home of a friend with two parents who seem to actually love their daughter and each other-and who awkwardly try to extend some semblance of family to Sammie. Horrified by the appeal of this, Sammie packs a bag and leaves her mother to her own devices. After a hustle gone dangerously wrong, her mother, Marlene, is sliding into an abyss of alcoholic depression, spending her days fantasizing aloud about death-a goal Sammie is tempted to help her accomplish. But now she finds herself backed into a corner. The child of two con artists, 16-year-old Sammie Bell always prided herself on knowing the score. From award-winning writer Billie Livingston, an unsparing novel of loyalty and survival that is fierce, sharp and funny even when it's breaking your heart.
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