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.