July 31, 2026

Good Company, by Kate Christensen

Kate Christensen’s new novel is a reckoning, and also a memoir disguised as a novel about a memoir. And as a novel Good Company is terrifically odd, but still most compelling, taking place over a weekend in which Julia Heimdahl, a midcareer writer in her 50s (whose biography resembles the author’s), attends a writers’ festival at her alma mater in the Pacific Northwest. She’s just published a memoir, which compiles her life’s most complicated relationships—with her difficult mother, her father who she witnessed beating her mother, old friends, boyfriends, her ex-husband, her new partner who’s a musician 20 years her junior. And she’s placed on a panel with a noted biographer who has recently published a memoir of his own, the vibes between them just a little off, which might have something to do with the allegations of historical sexual abuse that are on the verge of breaking.

The novel moves between encounters throughout the festival weekend—which end up resembling scenes from “This is Your Life,” past figures from Julia’s life most conveniently stepping into the story to have conversations that are conspicuously relevant to the novel’s central themes and ideas (it’s weird, but it works!) about gender, power, narrative, truth—and excerpts from Julia’s memoir. The latter underlines the ways in which Julia has made a point of being a cool girl throughout her life, someone who keeps up with the guys, who can write like a man (and also drink like one). And by the time Julia is telling her story now, she’s had enough therapy and reflection to understand how her difficult childhood helped to make her this way, but she’s not far enough along to know she can change.

Over the weekend, however, Julia begins to question her own complicity and complacency when it comes to terrible and/or predatory men, to acknowledge her own vulnerability, and confront the mixed messages she’s been receiving throughout her life about strength and power and femininity. Some of the literary figures in this novel are thinly disguised, which makes Good Company an especially juicy read, but it’s also powerful, moving, and incredibly profound.

PS I’ve been reading Christensen for a long time now, originally inspired by Maud Newton’s enthusiasm for her work. All these years later, it’s sometimes easy to forget how foundational Maud Newton’s blog was to me as an aspiring writer/literary person, a window into a world then that seemed so far away from mine.

July 30, 2026

Consistent

In case there was any question, I am still absolutely obsessed with my fire escape garden.

July 29, 2026

A Study in Red, by Connie Gault

A Study in Red, by Connie Gault, begins after a hot summer night in 1962, and a man who is dead in the morning. The pieces of the puzzle, the mystery, not yet locked into place—there is a woman who is fleeing, leaving her life, moving to an isolated cottage in rural Saskatchewan, and she’s been given a new name. She’s dyed her hair even blonder, and the ladies in the salon say she looks like Marilyn Monroe, whose own death will come over the news wires shortly. Narrating her experience like a character in a film noir, Amy Bell tells the story of how Amy Bell came to be.

And in a more contemporary time, a writer called Carol is recalling that very same summer as she lives under the weight of Long Covid and learns that Hattie has died, her death reported in the New York Times. Hattie, a popular novelist whom Carol had known through her aunt. That fateful summer, Carol, her younger sister, and their mother, had come to stay with the aunt at Hattie’s compound north of Edmonton. (Hattie spent her winters in California.) Where there were cottages, a swimming pool, where 13-year-old Carol was becoming aware of lust and desire as she eavesdropped on adult conversations, and she witnessed something terrible that was never spoken of again.

In a novel that’s both mystery and meditation, Connie and Amy attempt to solve (and then ever complicate) the puzzle of what really happened that summer, that night. Following her Toronto Book Award-nominated The Rasmussen Papers, A Study in Red is an examination of sisterhood, memory, narrative, and violence, and it’s both wonderfully strange and so compelling.

(It’s also one of our July giveaways at 49thShelf! Canadian readers can enter to win a copy here!)

July 27, 2026

Meeting New People, by Daniel M. Lavery

For a while now, but especially since publishing my own Barbara Pym inspired comic novel, people have been telling me I should read Daniel M. Lavery’s fiction, which similarly captures the ordinary details of single women’s lives and casts them in a new light, and when I heard about his latest, Meeting New People, I couldn’t help myself. A novel about a nearly-60-year old woman called Barbara who’s just been dumped by another friend who’s has enough of her caustic attitude and judgey ways, and who among us isn’t a little Barbara, or at least fearing that we are?

I will say that this novel wasn’t fun to read exactly, and sometimes it was a bit of a slog. Not much happens at all, and we’re trapped in Barbara’s head, and Barbara is fairly insufferable, utterly convinced of her righteousness, and yet made vulnerable enough by her latest friend bust-up that she’s determined to do a few things differently, at least until she’s able to source some friend replacements. She seeks them out in her workplace, by cruising local churches, though not in her NYV apartment building, where she’s determined to avoid her obnoxious downstairs neighbour, Lorraine.

But I also found the story very compelling, and Barbara beautifully sympathetic without Lavery having to resort to sentiment. There’s a beautiful combination of sadness and strength at the heart of the novel, and a most delightful moral complexity. It was very much an Anita Brookner-meets-Barbara Pym kind of situation, quiet, funny, and profound, and I’m glad I read it.

July 27, 2026

Sam’s Little Free Library

On the way to Quebec (via Ottawa) there were many stops along the way, though none of them were more important than Samantha Price’s Memorial Little Free Library in Carleton Place, the cutest LFL I’ve ever visited, and one that means a whole lot to me. I “met” Samantha Price Mitchell online in 2019 when I got involved with the Turning the Page on Cancer Readathon to support my friend Melanie, who lived with metastatic breast cancer until her death in 2021. Sam, who also had metastatic cancer, founded Turning the Page on Cancer as a way for those of who are more running-averse to raise funds, hope, and better outcome for those with Stage 4 cancer, the funds raised going toward Rethink, which shifts the common narrative on breast health and breast cancers—also supporting reading and literacy in the process. Obviously, I was all in.

Since Sam’s death in 2022, I’ve continued to participate in Turning the Page on Cancer to honour her legacy, and I miss her pep and her humour. And I love the beautiful LFL her family created to honour her memory (pink, of course! Sam was stylish always…) so was thrilled to finally see it in person, to take a couple of books to add to our vacation reads, and add a signed copy of DEFINITELY THRIVING.

July 24, 2026

Cottage Reading Recap

We were the luckiest people in the whole wide world when we ran away to rural Quebec for a week, returning to Toronto only just as the toxic smoke-filled skies were clean and blue again. I have never been more in need of a break, and the relaxation was epic, just so much sleeping, swimming, and reading (and eating! Quebec is delicious…).

My first book was Author Weekend, by Laura Zigman, a comic thrilled about an aging bestseller who will resort to anything to continue in the world of publishing (and I mean anything). It is perhaps a bit too inside baseball for the average reader, but I’m certainly part of the niche group this novel is designed to appeal to. And after a start that slow to get going, it did. It would be better if this novel skewering the reality of the publishing world and what an author has to resort to in order to make it was a stronger book—this one was trying to do too much at once. But it came together in the end and I really enjoyed it (but not as much as Zigman’s Small World, which I loved).

Next was Summer Reading, by Hilma Wolitzer, a used bookstore find I’ve been saving since the winter. I read Wolitzer’s 1980 novel Hearts last year and it was so incredible that now I want to read everything else by her. Summer Reading is the story of three women whose very different social circles overlap during one summer in the Hamptons—a wealthy wife who’s hoping a book club will help to fill part of the void in her life, the young woman from town who works for her during the summer, and the retired academic who’s eking out a living running wealthy women’s book clubs. By the end of the summer, all of these women’s lives will be changed. It was great, and I adored it.

I found Mary H.K. Choi’s Pool House less absorbing, its characters and their story at a remove, but part of that was by design, I think. Set in Los Angeles about a Korean-American actress who’s gone broke so she and her daughter are living in their pool house, the main house rented out to short-term tenants, the daughter working a local fast food joint with the dream of a promotion to management and getting to move away from her mother. When mother’s longtime lover and sitcom husband dies, the actor who played her TV comes to town, and the three of them perform their familial bonds in awkward, earnest, and dysfunctional ways. If I was younger and cooler, I’d likely like this book better, but it’s ending absolutely gets 5 stars from me.

Next up, still on the west coast, Tiffany Crum’s This Story Might Save Your Life, about Benny and Joy, two best friends who run a survival-themed podcast together, and then Joy and her husband suddenly disappear and Benny is left behind to piece together what has happened. Fun and breezy, with Arthur Fonzarelli allusions, I wouldn’t call this deftly plotted, exactly, but I liked reading it a lot.

Back to the east coast now, Nag’s Head, North Carolina. I found Eva Gates’ Death By Beach Read in a Little Free Library en-route to our vacation, and thought it would fit well into my vacation stack. Gates, who writes also under the name Vicki Delany, has written more than 20 cozy mystery novels with bookish themes, and while I wish the bookishness had factored into this one a bit more (there is a book group reading The House of Seven Gables, but not much is made of it) and it was pretty cookie cutter, it was still a good time. Lighthouse Librarian Lucy has moved into her new home with her fiance who is working hard to bring the dilapidated building into good condition, but the effort is set back when Lucy discovers a body in the kitchen and it turns out solving the mystery involves figuring out the true story of a reported haunting in that same house decades before.

I read Jenny Jackson’s The Shampoo Effect after that, set in a fictionalized Ipswich, Massachusetts, when the author is from (and which found its place on the literary map when John Updike moved to town in the 1960s). I liked Jackson’s debut novel, but I loved this follow-up, which manages to be frothy and smart at the very same time, inspired by Updike, perhaps. When a writer comes to town for the summer, she falls in love and becomes connected to her partner’s very tight group of friends (including the on-again-off-again girlfriend who is pregnant with his child). The points of view move between the writer, and three of the women in the friend-group, all of whom are coming secrets. Everything comes to an explosive climax that is resolved in the most perfect, and surprising way imaginable.

Sue Miller’s The Arsonist after that, set in New Hampshire, which barely has a seaside, and this novel is set in a different region altogether, but there are still conflicts between local people and summer people and lakes and ponds for swimming. When Frankie returns from 15 years working in east Africa to the New Hampshire village where her family has always spent their summers, tensions are especially high with an arsonist setting fires to people’s summer homes, the fires getting riskier and more dangerous all the time. Frankie begins an affair with the editor of the local newspaper, grapples with her father’s increasingly obvious dementia, and considers notions of home and belonging. I absolutely HATED this novel because it’s the last time I will ever read a novel by Sue Miller again (until she publishes something new—fingers crossed!). Which is to say that I didn’t hate this novel at all, in fact I love it, and Sue Miller’s books are just so incredibly excellent, a fact that gets undermined by how much they’re also such a pleasure.

And I read those last two novels so quickly that I had time to read one more! Dolly All The Time was the first Annabel Monaghan book I’ve ever read, and I loved it so much. Partly because its romantic lead was called Stewart—there aren’t enough romantic leads called Stewart/Stuart, and Stewart/Stuarts are some of my favourite people in the world. This fake dating story has oh so much heart, and more townie/outside tension, except Stewart Whitfield is not an outsider, exactly. The town of Whitfield (fictional, located next door to Newburyport, MA) is named after him, but he’s not of the place in the way that Dolly Brick is, Dolly who manages multiple gigs, raises her 12 year old son, and has come back to town for the summer to help her father run his fish store. When Stewart and Dolly team up to pose as a couple, he’s hoping to appear emotionally balanced enough to be made CEO of the family company, and Dolly’s looking to finance her father’s new roof, and both of them end with far more than they bargained for, namely LOVE. So funny, so clever, and so fresh, I was thrilled to fall head over heels with this one.

July 22, 2026

Road Trip Bookshop: Stirling Book Company

Fortuitously, Stirling Book Company was celebrating its second birthday when we rolled into town the other weekend, a road trip bookshop stop that appeared on the map when Google sent us up Highway 33 on the way to the Ivanhoe Cheese Factory. It was a particularly exciting stop for me, because Stirling was the very first town I ever knew, the town and its vicinity my original landscape. I have a theory that the places we’re located when our consciousness emerges become the building blocks of our understanding of absolutely everything, the foundation of our perception of the world, forever locked in. I remember Stirling circa the early 1980s in a way I know my own bones, the peculiar three-way intersection, where the Beckers used to be, the butter factory, the bank. Most of all though, I remember Shaw’s Shoes—most likely because I spoke with a lisp, and Shaw’s Shoes was a very hard thing for me to say.

And when I told the good people at the Stirling Book Company that I remembered Shaw’s Shoes, they told me, “This IS Shaw’s Shoes.” The very place, a shoe store the way that shoe stores used to be with boxes of shoes piled high along the walls, and a man who was able to making a reasonable living selling them. They showed me imprint on the wall from the old shelves, and the sign on the door in the back to the room which once housed a cobbler, and when I was there as a very small child, I didn’t note the beautiful wood floors or the tin ceiling. It is likely that the wood was covered with linoleum back then, the ceiling covered up with ugly panels, or perhaps these just weren’t the details I was paying attention to at the time.

I noted these details now though—Stirling Book Company is stunning. Carefully chosen selections, focused on local authors and presses, fun book merch, all the popular fare for those en-route to the cottage, and more elevated titles too. I ended up purchasing the fourth book in Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume series, which was one of Tracey’s staff picks, and my kids partook in celebratory treats as part of the birthday celebrations.

I love the idea that the spirit of Shaw’s Shoes—one of my most essential places—lives on as a bookshop. Welcome to my psychogeographical landscape, Stirling Book Company! Looking forward to the years to come.

July 20, 2026

Lucky!

Speaking of prestige TV, last night I had the amazing likely once in a lifetime experience of watching an Apple TV series based on a book written by MY ACTUAL FRIEND, Marissa Stapley if you can believe it. I still can’t, sometimes, because she’s as kickass as a friend as she is at pursuing and succeeding at incredible author dreams like this one. And she’s still just as wonderful a friend as she’s ever been, the truest of true blues, my number one donut companion, the one who understands the subtext in the screenshots I send. Those of us who get to love her are so LUCKY, and so is everybody who gets to watch this show, which I was determined to love but also a little unsure about because there were way more explosions in the trailer than I’m accustomed to in my entertainment, but wowza, the first episode was fantastic. Incredible acting, writing, cinematography, and that soundtrack, including THE SONG THAT FIONA APPLE WROTE ESPECIALLY FOR THE SERIES OMG. This might be the coolest, vicariously and otherwise, that I will ever be in my entire life. Marissa, I am so thrilled for you. No one has ever worked harder for a win like this. You are such a star and the world is brighter with your shine. Now go and watch LUCKY, everybody!

July 8, 2026

Actually Romantic

I was steeped in romance this week in advance of our (sold out!) Hot Summer Night event at Book Bar tomorrow night. I’d already read Chasing Summer, the rom-com debut by Frankie Scott (Zoe Whittall), and called it “A sparkling summer novel, and a gorgeous getaway to the beaches, vineyards, and rustic charms of Prince Edward County… [A]n engaging ode to first love, creative ambition, friendship, family, and forgiveness.”

But I was very happy to finally get a chance to read Lavanya Lakshmi’s debut, Leave and Come Back, about Simran, a woman who’s been estranged from her Indian-American family and returns to the fold for her cousin’s big wedding, only to have her boyfriend crash the party and get roped into partaking in the two weeks of celebrations and attempting to win the affection of a very formidable auntie. The story was richly textured with humour and meaning, and interwoven with themes of family, grief and forgiveness, as well as the cultural elements which blend different Indian traditions. The novel’s title comes from the Tamil word for “good bye,” which includes a promise of returning—a promise that Simran needs to learn how to keep.

And then I read Forever is the Sweetest Con, by Joanna Thurlow, the first release from new PEI romance imprint Sugar Shack Books, and did it ever satisfy. After being swindled by her boyfriend, with creditors now threatening to take her mother’s house, Las Vegas waitress and aspiring actress Cleo decides her surest bet is winning top prize on a brand new reality show billed as Love Island meets Survivor. After what happened with her ex, she’s definitely not looking for love, but she’s sure shes savvy enough to follow reality TV rules and act the part of happily ever after with Kei, a musician who has his own reasons for wanting to win, but then the entire production crew disappears and Cleo and the others are stranded on a remote Northern Ontario island. There are twists and turns and surprises galore, and this one kept me engaged to the very satisfying ending.

July 8, 2026

Easy Now

I want to provide an update to my post from early May which was a point at which hammering out the first draft of a novel was feeling like smashing my head against a brick wall—painful and not fun. After writing an entire novel last year that turned out to be nothing (mercifully! because I never want to have to look at it again!), I was more than a little concerned that was just the way I did things now, which did not seem like the best use of time. But I am happy to report that my current writing project really does seem to be otherwise.

I had to break my cardinal rule of first drafts to get to this point though, which is a reminder that even the best rules have their limits. And that rule, for first drafts, was JUST KEEP GOING, GET TO THE END, but by 52,000 words into the manuscript, it was clear that I hadn’t built sufficient threads into the narrative to sustain the story. And so I went back to the beginning, in fact I wrote two entire chapters that take place before that beginning, and I added all kinds of points, scenes and details that flesh the story out. I was also making a common error I see in my manuscript consultation clients’ work, which is exploring disconnection between two characters by having them share no common points at all. But like, if the characters are already so disconnected that no connection can be elucidated, then who cares, right? No, the stakes arrive when the threads are there, even if they’re just barely hanging on. Or when you bring two characters into the same room but they might as well be a million miles apart.

The story was lying really flat in May, and part of my objective in going back to the beginning was adding motion, movement. My original opening scene took place in the morning, as the sun rose, but that is boring and cliched. The new opening scene features my character in the middle of eating her lunch at her desk in her office (which is prohibited) when she is interrupted by a senior staff member with an urgent request, and now all of a study there are stakes, momentum, ongoingness. The story had been missing its energy, its driving force, but it’s there now, and so is the humour. I honestly have no idea how to write funny, and certainly a story that’s flat is going to make humour even harder to come by, but I’ve managed to conjure it, and it’s delightful.

I had a goal of finishing my first draft by the end of July, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. I’m still going through that first first draft, adding substance and details to it, and I’m only 2/3 of the way through. But I’m getting somewhere, and even better, I am having fun.