Ida is a forty-year-old architect, single and starting to panic - all she sees are other people's children, everywhere. On a family holiday in the idyllic Nowegian countryside, she's rapidly regressing, picking fights with her sister Marthe and flirting with Marthe's husband, But when some supposedly wonderful news from Marthe sends tensions rocketing, Ida is forced to finally recognise that there's more than one way to grow up. Funny and unexpectedly devastating, Grown Ups is for anyone who has ever felt the fear of being overtaken and who has had to mark out new milestones of their own.

"This is cringe-comedy at its finest, with Aubert's wry observations cranking things up well beyond eleven. Venomous. Bitchy. Brilliant" - Independent Ireland

"Drily funny and emotionally gripping, it's the perfect summer read" - Vogue, The Absolute Best Summer Reads

"A really sensitive and thoughtful evocation of a sibling relationship, a family relationship, and an experience that women go through regardless of what walk of life they're living" - Radio 4 Open Book

"Exploring the modern themes of dating apps and egg freezing, this is a real page turner with the impressive ability to be both hilarious and devastating" - Independent

"[A] comic, painfully human story about what it means to be an adult when you don't have a family of your own" - Vogue

"A succinct and thought-provoking exploration of the family unit and how it shapes individual lives" - Irish Times

"This novel from Norwegian rising star Aubert stands out thanks to its sharp observations and distinctive characters" - iPaper

"Grown Ups tackles big themes with aplomb, weaving together blistering comedy, searing disappointment and close-to-the-bone commentary on family dysfunction, sibling rivalry and modern motherhood" - The Herald

"Don't be fooled by its size - this is a sharp, timely novel with characters who linger" - Business Post

"This book is a little firecracker that, with its nimble gearshifts, will make you laugh, think and feel. I've no doubt it will stamp Aubert's name on Anglophone literary horizons, and I'm itching to see what she comes up with next" - European Literature Network

"A quiet, almost thrillerish, family story that Aubert lightly and elegantly steers towards disaster" - Dagens Nyheter, Sweden

"An enchantingly funny novella which will ring uncomfortably true to anyone with a sibling or a tricky parental relationship" - Independent

"Aubert [has a] singular aptitude for presenting the difficulties of being human with grace and sensitivity, and [an] unerring ability to find humour in the darkest corners" - Lunate

"A sharp and intimate sibling drama of love, pain and growing up. Very Norwegian, and astonishingly good" - Borås Tidning, Sweden (critics’ favourite)

"Marie Aubert's punch-in-the-stomach debut is an intense and utterly absorbing chamber play about the longing to have children and sibling jealousy, where the fury of each line tears into you like a nail against a chalkboard" - M Magasin, Sweden

"A perfect little gem... With elegance and almost merciless clearsightedness, Aubert dissects a family and its internal relationships within the space of a few summer days" - Aftonbladet, Sweden

"Without ever getting pretentious or abstract, Aubert identifies the most acute details, the razor sharp cruelties that may be dressed up as friendliness or small-talk" - Nya Wermlandstidningen, Sweden

"That's the wonderful thing about Grown Ups, that it tightly, sensitively and without a lot of gesticulating, deals with the difficulties of being a human being" - Svenska Dagbladet, Sweden

"Aubert's devilish, entertaining humour... is all the more comic in contrast with the fundamental melancholy of these works" - Information, Denmark

"An outstanding novel ... One of those books that take up little physical space, but still manages to tell a big, involving story" - Litteratursiden.dk

"Classic, slightly nasty and elegant... A wonderful little chamber drama with a punch" - Dagsavisen, Books of the Year

"I gulped this one down like a delicious summer cocktail. Cringe TV in the form of a novel, and quite simply a devastatingly good novel" - Dagbladet, Books of the Year 2019

"Aubert's book is a small, pioneering work about being a single woman in our modern age" - Klassekampen

"Most similar to Elena Ferrante, Marie Aubert pulls no punches in her depiction of family dysfunction... Candid scenes of intimacy, jealousy, and vengeance give this book copious amounts of spice" - SRQ