August 11, 2026

Lighthouse Books is a Lighthouse

It’s been ten years since the first time we turned up at Lighthouse Books in Brighton, ON, totally by accident (I swear!), on the tail end of a weekend of camping at Presqu’ile Provincial Park, completely unaware that there was a wonderful bookstore in town. But we were fast besotted and have returned almost every year since, even in 2020 when Kathryn was selling books at a table at the door and we were all wearing masks, and she recognized me even incognito, which is just one of the reasons why Kathryn is such a wonderful bookseller. (Seriously. Who knows the name of a customer who makes one annual visit??)

The other reason is Kathryn’s taste in her books, and her focus on Canadian titles, and her highlighting of regional picks. Lighthouse Books is just such a lighthouse, really, and I was so happy for the chance to sign copies of my novel there, and to see #DefinitelyThriving on the featured Canadians shelf in such excellent company.

And then everybody in my family went to pick out one book each, except that most us chose two. I love that I have customer accounts at bookstores all across Ontario, and had acquired enough points at Lighthouse Books to save $15.00 on our latest purchase—who says that publishing is not an economically lucrative endeavour?!?

PS I might have forgotten about our first trip to Lighthouse Books ten years ago and that I’d written an entirely blog post about it, except that Kathryn had printed out that post and it’s been on display in the bookshop ever since!

August 10, 2026

Waist Deep, by Linea Maja Ernst, translated by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg

Midsummer is an idyll, a shimmering dream-scape, mirage-like, impossible to hold, and in Waist Deep, the Danish novel by by Linea Maja Ernst, translated by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg, it’s a moment that awakens new and wondrous possibilities. A very loose modern retelling of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Waist Deep takes place at a Danish lake house where five university friends have reconvened with their partners and children, and Karen and Esben announce that the occasion is actually their wedding. For Sylvia, however, ensconced in a monogamy with her girlfriend Charlie, the news rekindles her feelings for Esben and the paths not chosen, and she articulates her disappointment in her friends for choosing convention and mediocrity when a decade before they’d all been intent on being radicals.

Over a week of swimming, sunbathing, talking, reading, and cooking together, the friends contemplate their connection and disconnection, a slow and dreamy narrative that’s also gorgeous and profound.

August 4, 2026

Definitely Thriving in Muskoka!

So excited for this!

On Monday August 17, Muskoka Lakes Public Library kick off their week of 25th-anniversary celebrations with a #DefinitelyThriving author event in Port Carling, right in the heart of beautiful Muskoka.

There is no cost to attend, but please register by calling 705-765-5650 or emailing info@mlpl.ca.

August 4, 2026

The Valley of the Vengeful Ghosts, by Kim Fu

There is something wonderfully inscrutable about Kim Fu’s The Valley of the Vengeful Ghosts, in the way that the metaphors aren’t metaphors. After the death of her mother, Eleanor follows her final wish and uses her inheritance to buy a house, the only house she can afford, a model home on the site of a cursed development that turns out to be shoddily constructed, the rain pouring in, the shower draining into the chandelier in the hallways. That the house is haunted turns out to be the least of the trouble, the ghosts being figments of Eleanor’s imagination, including people who are actually alive, the clients that Eleanor counsels through her work as a therapist for an online platform.

Things were not supposed to be like this. Eleanor’s story alludes to an assault during her graduate studies, a faculty member who was never held accountable, how Eleanor’s mother stepped in and wholly took over the management of her life as she lived in the aftermath of trauma, and became trapped in a depression and helplessness from which she’s never recovered, a kind of ghost (of) herself—though far from vengeful.

As the rains fall and the water rises, Eleanor’s model home become more and more permeable, the novel heading for an inevitable climax that manages to be surprising, to offer just the appropriate amount of grace. A lesser work would make all this a statement on real estate, capitalism, mental illness, loneliness, trauma, or some other such thing, but Fu’s novel manages to have created a novel that is firmly about itself.

August 3, 2026

Mind the Gap, by Alice Zorn

As its title suggests, the preoccupations of Alice Zorn’s story collection, Mind the Gap—which follows her 2024 novel Colours in Her Hands—are the spaces between—in terms of geography, language, understanding, and so much more. And the stories themselves are a bridge from there to here, each one cantilevered in ways that are seemingly perilous, the whole structure wobbling at moments, before landing the reader in another place that is not necessarily the intended destination.

In “Born—Died,” an adoptee travels to Mexico to investigate her origins; “Our Ladies” is the collection’s most local story, set on the Gaspe Peninsula, where a Montreal-based translator relocates into an altogether foreign culture. I loved the title story, about a Canadian woman whose connection to her eccentric German cousin unfolds and changes (but also remains constant) over decades through letters and their travels in Europe and England. A physically disabled woman is inspired by Frida Kahlo to seek what her self desires on a vacation in Mexico in “Frida Walks”; in “Not a Game,” a woman forms something of a bond with her partner’s teenage daughter while on vacation in Tunisia; a chance encounter brings a textile conservationist to go seeking in Oaxaca, Mexico in “The Land of Clouds”‘; and a man follows his ex’s last wishes on a trip through Texas in “What the Dead Want.” The final piece, a novella, “Morocco,” is the story of two friends who fly to Morocco in search of a missing boyfriend, but what they actually find there is something quite different than what they were expecting.

So many gaps—between who we are and who we want to be. Between who other people are and who we want them to be, or who we expect them to be. Between what we think and what we say, between what we say and what we do. Between what we want and what we have. Between what we owe others and what we owe ourselves.

In Mind the Gap, Alice Zorn’s narrative threads map the distance to memorable effect.

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.