PRICKLY COMPANY

Available May 28, 2024!

Friendships, feuds, romance, and unexpected secrets shake up a small community in this sharply funny and compassionate novel by the author of Five Winters.

Frances Mathews doesn’t get out much since her husband died, but that doesn’t stop her from jump-starting a campaign to create a hedgehog highway in Hilltop Place—feeding stations, holes at the bottoms of gates and fences, and wild garden areas for hibernation. To Frances’s delight, her neighbours are on board. Mostly.

There are Jess and Michael, whose marriage is cracking under the unanticipated strain of a recent adoption. And Ryan, a wounded war reporter struggling to connect with his son after a divorce and forced to return to an exasperating parental fold. Plus, a very forthright single mum new to the neighbourhood and an exceedingly proper couple not about to upend their picture-perfect garden for prickly nuisances.

As relationships—from the romantic to the nerve-racking—form and secrets are unearthed, Hilltop Place is threatened in ways that affect them all…unaware hedgehogs included. What Frances and her charitable neighbours soon discover about themselves and each other is hardly what any of them expected.

What people are saying:

“Prickly Company has it all: romance, suspense, intrigue, and a community of quirky characters all learning to help each other. As a bonus, there are lots of lovable, prickly hedgehogs that will have you rethinking your landscaping situation. I loved every page of this book!” —Maddie Dawson, bestselling author of Matchmaking for Beginners

“Bursting with witty dialogue and plenty of hilarious moments, Prickly Company will enchant readers from the first page. I adored every quirky character and felt like part of the neighborhood by the end of this smart, funny, and charming novel.” —Kerry Lonsdale, Wall Street Journal bestselling author

“Prickly Company is such an absorbing read, featuring a tangle of fascinating characters and a hedgehog’s-eye-view of the multitudes of things that can go very wrong—and very right—when they begin to cross each other’s paths. Johnson's writing is warm and earthy and the inhabitants of Hilltop Place—human and hedgehog—will stay with me for quite some time.” —Suzy Krause, author of Sorry I Missed You