March 11, 2026
Books in DEFINITELY THRIVING
You might already know that DEFINITELY THRIVING is a bookish book, but did you know that a major plot point involves the whereabouts of a copy of Cathy Park Hong’s essay collection MINOR FEELINGS? (Follow me for more hot tips for writing scintillating narratives…) Writing a novel set in a disorganized bookshop with a questionable cataloguing system was a lot of fun because it enabled my protagonist to come across so many of my favourite titles, and I even wrote my first edition of Carol Shields’ THE REPUBLIC OF LOVE into the text (what a find!).
DEFINITELY THRIVING is out on Tuesday, and includes so many picks to add to your reading list!
March 11, 2026
Scheduled Maintenance
Once again, as has been the case for the past three years in March, “my” pool has closed for a week of scheduled maintenance, and so my daily routine (do we call it a “rut” for short? Maybe we do?) has had to temporarily shift. As it’s the week following the clocks’ change to Daylight Savings Time, the shift has been extra, me waking before the sun and venturing out in the early morning amidst the cheer-cheer-cheers from wakey cardinals singing in the trees to ride the subway east and then walk south to the Wellesley Community Centre, a bright and modern swimming pool that’s free for everyone and whose cool water is such a refreshing change from where I usually swim. And I really love the shift so much, a window onto a different part of the day, a different part of the city, a new direction, a bit of flexibility that demonstrates just how much room there is to stretch and grow, room I don’t pay much attention to most of time. Because I like my routine very much—if this is a rut I will take it. But it’s just so easy to forget how much more there is, how different things can be, how invigorated I feel when I step out of my comfort zone, and so it’s useful to be reminded, and it makes me wonder how I might look for this kind of space in other part of my life.
March 10, 2026
The Secret Diary of Mona Hasan, by Salma Hussain
As an Adrian Mole superfan who turned 12 in 1991, I was on familiar ground with Salma Hussain’s debut middle grade novel, The Secret Diary of Mona Hasan—a year in the life of a girl growing up in Dubai who spends the summer with her grandparents and cousins in her parents’ native Pakistan before her family emigrates to Canada, a book we got free with our cereal from Kelloggs’ Feeding Reading promotion—which my daughter read and loved before I did. Although the book she read and loved was not the same one that I experienced, the central charm of Hussain’s novel for an adult reader being the gap between the story Mona is telling and what’s actually going on around her. (Mona and her sister decide to name their new baby brother Osama, after the Urdu and Arabic word for lion. “Oh, Allah, what a bright future awaits him with such an auspicious name!”). As with Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole books, which Mona references here as among of her own favourites (“it’s about a thirteen-year-old boy growing up in a part of England called the “East Midlands,” which sounds a lot like the ‘Middle East,’ doesn’t it…”), a precocious young person has no idea what they don’t know, readers of their own age taking much of the narrative at face value, and still finding much to appreciate (this novel is a bit Are You There, Allah? It’s Me, Mona).
There’s a lot going on in Mona’s diary as her year kicks off—a creepy uncle who’s a little too handsy; the first Gulf War, which doesn’t even occasion a school closure (Mona is proud of herself for remembering from TV that only 383 Americans are killed in the ground offensive. Her sister asks how many Iraqis died: “Don’t be ridiculous, Tutoo. No one on TV keeps a count of dead Iraqi bodies.”); Mona’s mother’s nascent feminism; a change to the gym program requiring actual sports; and then an infatuation with Waleed, a boy who inspires poetry of the same calibre that Adrian Mole used to write for Pandora Braithwaite. Once the family arrives in Canada, a country that fails to live up many of its promises for Mona’s parents, Mona continues to do her best to stay brave and hopeful, clearly the hero of her life in her own mind—and by the end of the novel, her reader is also fully on board.
March 9, 2026
Telephone, by Percival Everett
I’ve been wanting to read more by Percival Everett since reading Maris Kreizman’s note that “as his major publisher debut, James feels so falsely profound that I have to wonder if Everett is fucking with us. I wouldn’t put it past him and I’d respect him all the more…” Having seen American Fiction, the film based on Everett’s novel Erasure, I don’t think such a idea would be so shocking. And so I finally picked up Telephone, published in 2020, famously published in three different versions, with subtle variations, just to underline that no two people are ever really reading the same book anyway, and underlining the novel’s considerations and questions about actions and outcomes, truth and consequences.
Telephone is about a geologist/paleobiologist who digs deep in his job, but leaves depths unplumbed in his personal and emotional life, which makes things extra strained and complicated when his twelve-year-old daughter is diagnosed with a debilitating neurological disease that has no cure or treatment. Meanwhile he’s negotiating fraught dynamics with women in his workplace, and preoccupied with written cries for help appearing on scraps of paper tucked into the pockets of used clothing he’s buying from an online seller. Is there anybody he can save?
The narrator’s reserve means that this novel about a man witnessing his child’s terminal decline is nearly bearable, but also means that the reader needs to reach far to understanding what might be going on being this story’s surface of reticence, such spareness. Nothing is quite what it seems in this novel, underlining Maris Kreizman’s thesis. It’s true that to read fiction at all is to open oneself up to be fucked with, but it seems like Percival Everett might have a knack for making this into an art form.
March 6, 2026
Almost Paradise!
The last movie I saw before the world shut down in 2020 was PONYO at Paradise Theatre and movie theatres (along with EVERYTHING) were one of those parts of community and city life that I missed so much in the months and years that followed, especially listening to doomsayers who droned that we’d never get them back again.
I started writing DEFINITELY THRIVING in 2021 because I wanted to write a book that would make me happy, to find a way out of such a dark and scary time, and that we all gathered last night at Paradise Theatre, the very place I was dreaming of as I was writing, only underlines how we never knew how the story might unfold, that sometimes things work out rather beautifully in the end.
And how particularly beautiful that I got to launch this book in conversation with the NYT-bestselling Marissa Stapley whose novel LUCKY has become an AppleTV series hitting screens this summer starring ACTUAL Annette Bening and Anya Taylor-Joy. (!!)
Thank you to all the beautiful people who filled the room last night!! It was such a joyful celebration and so much fun to revisit BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY on its 25th anniversary. Thank you for booing Daniel Cleaver, as you should, and being a terrifically engaged audience.
Thank you for helping Type Books sell SO MANY BOOKS last night! Thanks to the family and friends who keep showing up for these things. Thanks to people who showed up who didn’t know me at all—what a thing!! Thank you to Emma Rhodes for her calm, reassuring and awesome presence, and all her hard work to make the night happen. Thank you to House of Anansi who’ve shown this book so much support. And thank you to universe for granting us an event that did not require me to carry a sheet cake across town—WOULD RECOMMEND.
The only disappointment was that nobody crashed through a plate glass window. And that Salman Rushdie could not be there.
DEFINITELY THRIVING is officially out March 17, but slowly creeping into bookstores already! Hope you get your copy soon. And I hope you love it.
March 4, 2026
Endling, by Maria Reva
I was going to write something about how I was a co-juror for the 2022 Kobzar Book Award, a prize for Ukrainian-Canadian literature, and vividly recall how much more viscerally I felt the Russian invasion of Ukraine that February for having been just steeped in stories of Holodomor and less abjectly genocidal elements of Soviet Ukrainian life as per Maria Reva’s first book, Good Citizens Need Not Fear, which would take the top prize. I remember how the ceremony had to be moved online due to ongoing pandemic reasons, and how shattered the award’s organizers from the Ukrainian-Canadian community were by what was happening in the country whose culture we were celebrating, how the whole thing was devastating and just so profoundly tragic and sad. (And four years later, Ukraine still fights. Having been steeped in those stories, I’m not surprised by this either, just heartbroken.)
But then what does it mean to consider experiencing a war from worlds away? Do any feelings, however visceral, matter at such a distance? What it means to have a thousands of tanks roll into a sovereign nation and interrupt your plans, if your plans happen to be an awards ceremony in Edmonton? Or a novel you’re writing in Vancouver, in case of Reva herself, or at least her proxy in the novel Endling, which is just a wild and wonderful experience and an experiment in what a novel might possibly contain.
Endling is about a snail scientist in Ukraine who funds her mobile lab by working as a potential bride for international suitors who arrive in the country on romance tours, though she has no interest in romance herself. This work brings her into a contact with a pair of sisters who are hatching a plan to kidnap a bunch of the bachelors as part of a campaign to attract attention from their long lost activist mother, and they pull it off just as the Russians are invading Ukraine, turning the country into a war zone. And here the novel veers into a wild meta-narrative of the author’s own fiction being disturbed by war in the very place she’s writing about, this narrative weaving in and out of the broader story in an unsettling and fascinating way.
What is fiction? What can fiction do? What does it mean to suppose we can control any narrative at all?
Endling unsettles in the very best way.
March 4, 2026
Mysteries of Pittsburgh
Due to a winter storm, my short trip to Pittsburgh for the American Booksellers Association Winter Institute was even shorter than scheduled, but oh, we made the most of it. My publisher House of Anansi Press set up meetings with delightful and inspiring booksellers across the US doing inspiring and life changing work everyday, standing up for the kind of world they believe in. Meeting so many booksellers at the Authors Reception was exciting and I was thrilled to be able to tell them about the fictional bookshop in my book.
I also loved exploring this gorgeous city, being awed by its beautiful rivers and so many bridges. (I got to cross the Rachel Carson Bridge TWICE last Wednesday!). Pittsburgh is even more stunning than it is during the opening scenes of FLASHDANCE, which is saying something because that was a tremendous promise.
And best of all: Pittsburgh booksellers. I got to visit Posman Books, White Whale Books, and City Books, which is pretty good coverage for a single day in town. I loved each store so much and the suitcase I brought home was SO HEAVY.
The most surprising and wonderful thing about all of it, particularly for an event that was so massive, was how intimate and human it all was. From my cab driver from the airport, an immigrant from Cote D’Ivoire, who talked to me about how much he loved Pittsburgh, the bookseller from Kentucky I had dinner with whose colleague was someone I’d been chatting with on Substack, to the friends-of-friends who I met at the Authors Reception, and the bookseller I’d met that afternoon who popped into the reception to pick up a copy of my book—it was all so magical and affirming.
Best whirlwind ever. Thank you, Pittsburgh!
March 2, 2026
Brawler, by Lauren Groff
Nearly 20 years later, I still remember what it felt like to be reading Lauren Groff for the first time, her debut novel The Monsters of Templeton, a book that could have been a one-off, clever, a gimmick. And then a year later I’d read her story collection Delicate Edible Birds and realize that Lauren Groff can do ANYTHING (and also she writes swimlit!). These were delicate, edible and sometimes absolutely brutal stories that veered off on all directions, the same way Groff has continued to do throughout her career with her novels, to the point where I’m not always interested in all of her projects (which is fine—a writer should pursue her own fascinations) and her latest release, the short story collection Brawler, only underlines her narrative power, precision and excellence.
Lauren Groff’s novels are sweeping—Arcadia and Fates and Furies!—and her short fiction manages to be just the same, every little little story an epic, some of these unfolding over years and decades. Usually long short stories are not my favourite, but I never wanted any of the stories in Brawler to end, only getting through it when they did because the endings are so exquisite and worthy of the head-exploding emoji.
Each story hinges on a moment of unfathomable consequence. “Wind,” the first, takes place in the 1950s as a woman attempts to flee her husband’s violence, the story narrated by her eldest child; in “To Sunland,” a young woman makes a choice when she become responsible for her disabled brother; in “Brawler,” a high school diver with bloody knuckles reckons with her mother’s illness; “Birdie” probes the dark edges of female friendship; “What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf?” is a masterpiece that takes a rich kid from the idyll of childhood to the darkest night of the soul (and the ending!! omg); “Under the Wave” explores the aftermath of a climate-change driven natural disaster; “Such Small Islands” is about a little girl not quite aware of her own power (or is she?); and “Annunication” about a young woman’s reckless choices whose consequences come for others.
If you want to be devastated over and over again (what else is reading for?), then Brawler is the book for you. One of the sharpest, and most haunting works I’ve encountered in a long time.
March 1, 2026
Definitely Thriving on Tour!
Tuesday March 3 in Stratford
Tuesday Night Book Release Party at the Bruce Hotel
- Free to attend, RSVP required
Thursday March 5 in Toronto
Bridget Jones’s Diary at the Paradise Theatre, and a conversation with Marissa Stapley
Wednesday March 18 in Etobicoke
Meet and Greet at A Novel Spot Books (Thorncrest Plaza, 1500 Islington Ave., Unit 4)
- Free event, details to come!
Sunday March 22 in Uxbridge
Book Drunkard Festival Brunch with Kerry Clare and Bianca Marais, Wooden Sticks Golf Club, 11-1pm
Thursday March 26 in Peterborough
In conversation with Megan Murphy at Take Cover Books, 59 Hunter Street East
- Free event, details to come!
Saturday March 28 in East Gwillimbury
Event with the East Gwillimbury Public Library
- Details to come!
Thursday April 16 in New York City
Humor, Self-Discovery, & Love – A Totally Booked: Live! Event at the Whitby Hotel (18 West 56th Street)
April 17/18 in Hamilton
Part of the 2026 gritLIT: Hamilton Readers and Writers Festival
- Details to Come!
Saturday April 25 in Uxbridge
Canadian Independent Bookstore Day at Book Heron Books
- Details to come!
Wednesday April 28 in Waterloo
Waterloo Public Library Event in Partnership with Words Worth Books, Eastside Branch (2001 University Avenue East), 7-8pm
Thursday April 29 in Toronto
Flying Books Author Social at 371 Queen Street West, in conversation with Julia Zarankin
- Details to come!
Saturday May 2 in Port Hope
Reading at Port Hope Public Library in partnership with Furby House Books.
- Details to come!
Sunday May 3 in Toronto
Junction Reads in-person with Liz Johnston and Alice Fitzpatrick. TYPE Books Junction, 2887 Dundas Street West. 6:30pm ET.
February 27, 2026
Why We Read, by Shannon Reed
I do not entirely regret to inform you that being obsessed with Pittsburgh has become my entire personality, and Shannon Reed’s collection Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries, and Just One More Page Before Lights Out was the perfect Pittsburgh souvenir to bring home from my whirlwind trip for the American Booksellers’ Association Winter Institute. And not just because there’s an essay in the collection entitled “The Five People You Meet When You Work in a Bookstore” that’s dedicated to the very bookseller who sold me the book. (Is the sixth person you meet when you work in a bookstore a Canadian author who’s hiked across the city to see your beautiful bookshop and is a little bit too excited about having walked over a bridge? It turns out that nobody in Pittsburgh gets excited about crossing bridges! Unbelievable that bridge crossing ever gets old…)
I started reading Why We Read on my flight home, and finished it this morning, about 26 hours later, and I loved the journey from start to finish, in which Reed—a Professor at the University of Pittsburgh—takes the reader through her life in books and reading. She writes about growing up in books and libraries, and the safety and comfort she found in reading as a hearing impaired person. The essays are familiar, warm, and loosely chronological, personal but also with touches that will be universal to anyone who’s ever been compelled to pick up a book about books. (It’s me!) In between the essays are humour pieces with titles like “Signs Your May Be a Female Character in a Work of Historical Fiction” (“Your name is Sarah.”) or “Signs You May Be An Adult Character in a YA Novel” (“You are dead.”).
A childhood pilgrimage to see the hole in the ground where the Ingalls family lived in On the Banks of Plum Creek, the saga of trying to get her preschool students to stop selecting a picture book version of “Old MacDonald” at story time, introducing her public school students to libraries, being assigned to teach a university course on vampires even though she’s terrified of vampires, adding George Saunders Lincoln in the Bardo to her course syllabus and only after sitting down to read and realizing she didn’t understand the novel (!). How she skimmed for the Pizza Hut BOOK IT! program and maybe missed the point (but got the personal pan pizza. She writes about how reading requires us to be vulnerable, to be okay with not always understanding or knowing, with being wrong sometimes. About pretentious English Major guys whose favourite novels are Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Moby Dick…
Wise, kind, funny, intimate, and surprising, reading these essays feels like meeting a friend.
