September 10, 2026
The Little Way, by Carol Bruneau
Carol Bruneau’s latest novel, much like her celebrated fictionalization of the life of Maud Lewis, Brighten the Corner Where You Are, is a celebration of the ordinary extraordinary, those pockets of wonder and colour that a lesser writer might forget to notice. Set in contemporary Halifax, it’s a very “voice-y” novel from the point of view of Isla Fownes who, at age 49, has slept in the very same bedroom all her life in the historical home with water frontage on the city’s Northwest that she shares with her elderly father and her drifting daughter who’s just announced a surprise pregnancy. Like Lewis did, Isla “brightens the corner where she is” as a local florist, but sometimes the task seems overwhelming against a backdrop of climate disaster, social inequality, and runaway real-estate speculation. Thankfully she can take comfort in her new partner, a widower who’d washed up on her shores the autumn before when his sailboat sunk.
The Little Way is the story of a season, Bruneau writing Isla and her friends and family through their days, days filled with mundanity and miracles, trials and pleasures. It’s a novel that plays tricks with language, embracing the vernacular, and doesn’t hold its readers’ hands either, demanding close attention instead of breeziness, the way that the most important things always do.
