September 16, 2025
Lucky Night, by Eliza Kennedy
I was a different person ten years ago when I read and reviewed Eliza Kennedy’s novel I Take You, and praised its portrayal of a woman who dares to defy societal expectations of what a wife is supposed to be, how a woman is supposed to behave (in commercial fiction, no less!). Or maybe I was the exact same person but had not yet learned how much our society resists these narratives; how the patriarchy is determined to prevail, whatever it takes; and what a low tolerance commercial fiction readers tend to have for female protagonists who are, shall we say, imperfect candidates. For protagonists who blur the lines between right and wrong, who aren’t trying to make us like them, who know themselves if they know anything at all. (I published my own book with such a protagonist in 2017. The reception on Goodreads caught me by surprise, which seems so naive now.)
A decade later, I picked up Kennedy’s third novel, Lucky Night, about Jenny and Nick, both married (to other people) who’ve been having illicit trysts here and there for six years, but never have they managed to spend a whole night together. Until now, when Nick books them into a brand new luxury hotel in a Manhattan high rise, and their time together begins as expected, although not without hiccups—it’s a heady moment as they contemplate their situation (the novel moves between their two third-person perspectives, back and forth in scene) and also alarms keep going off in the building, glitches in the system, simply a distraction (and they’re assured that everything is fine).
Even without the alarms, things would be fraught for Nick and Jenny. What do they really mean to each other? And why does each of them find it impossible to say? After six years of relations, they’re still putting on masks for each other, still pretending to be people other than who they are, still resistant to admitting what they really mean to each other and what consequences that could mean for their marriages, their children, their entire lives. (Refreshingly, this is a not a novel about guilt or shame regarding adultery. Both Nick and Jenny have worked through those feelings, and Lucky Night is about something more complicated, more interesting. Kennedy cites Laura Kipnis’s Against Love in her acknowledgements, a book that’s described as “an indictment of the martial ideal”).
And then the stakes get kicked way up high when it turns out the building is on fire, and Jenny and Nick are stranded way up above the blaze, awaiting a rescue that may never come, their story a locked room thriller with a consideration of the minutiae of high rise fires and the dynamics of adultery, sex and love. Will the lovers get what they deserve? And what they deserve exactly, I suppose, depends on your perspective, something that each of them is aware of. And the novel’s author is surely aware of this too, but makes Lucky Night brave, propulsive, and interesting.
September 16, 2025
It’s a Love Story
My friend sent me a message on Monday: “How much is love really like driving a new Maserati down a dead end street?????” And it’s a good question, I think, one that underlines just how much Taylor Swift is a songwriter on par with Bruce Springsteen (which is saying a lot). The line that open Swift’s song “Red” from her 2012 album of the same name, and continues, “Faster than the wind, passionate as sin, ending so suddenly/ Loving him is like trying to change your mind/ Once you’re already flying through the free fall/ Like the colors in autumn, so bright, just before they lose it all.”
Fall is Taylor Swift season for me now. Okay, all the seasons are Taylor Swift seasons for me now—(Forever) winter, (Cruel) summer, spring a time of lavender hazes and purple pink skies, new beginnings. But oh, fall, the season of Evermore. Plaid shirt days, as we start the countdown back to December and also anticipate a brand new album forthcoming in just over two weeks. I can’t wait.
2025 marks ten years of me being a Swiftie, of us being a family of Swifties (with a short hiatus when Reputation came out, and we thought we didn’t like her anymore. [We were wrong]). Ten years ago this summer, my six-year-old daughter came home from day camp and told us she liked a song called “Bad Blood,” a song I’d never even heard of, although I’d heard of Taylor Swift—I heard “Love Story” for the first time on the radio in 2009 when I was driving to pick up a second-hand crib off Craigslist for her when she was a baby; I remember hearing “I Knew You Were Trouble” playing on the radio in a candy shop while I toted her in a carrier on my chest.
But Taylor Swift never really permeated my consciousness until “Bad Blood” and we bought the 1989 album, and my memories of that summer have that album as the soundtrack, my kids still so little, in carseats in the backseat. (Which reminds me of her lyric from “Cruel Summer,” “I’m drunk in the back of a car/ and I cried like a baby coming home from the bar.” And how my kids were so confused wondering why a baby was coming home from a bar, and what had happened at the bar that had upset the baby so much.) I loved it all, but especially fell in love with “Shake It Off” and the idea that my children might grow up with music in their minds saying, “It’s gonna be alright.”
Which has been what Taylor Swift has meant for me every since (Reputation era notwithstanding, although it grew on me). I remember listening to her Lover album in July 2020, and being so grateful for it as some light in the darkness. And then she went and dropped her Folklore and Evermore albums (on July 24 and December 11), both of them such gifts when everything was sad and hard, to get lost in her storytelling, characters like Dorothea; Rebecca Harkness; Marjorie; Betty, Jame, the narrator of “August” (plus that notorious gossip, Inez). Every August since, I’ve spent the month humming lines about salt air and rusty doors. And now I think of summer’s turn into fall as the “August” to “Cardigan” transition. All of it so bittersweet, beautiful and ephemeral.
Last November was a nightmare, the results of the US presidential election terrifying for reasons that have come to pass, and I feel like it’s part of why everyone dove in a bit extra when Taylor Swift arrived in Toronto for her Eras tour dates over the course of that month. There has never been a more joyous, fun and creative time to experience Toronto, which came alive with (non-tortured) poets in the streets, Swift-themed pop-ups, a street temporarily renamed Taylor Swift Way, shops, restaurants and tourist destinations getting in on the Swiftie action. (Our Swiftie family took first prize in the Royal Ontario Museum’s Taylor Swift Scavenger Hunt, WHICH WAS NOT EASY, and we continue to celebrate this as one of our proudest accomplishments.) Tay-Ronto was pretty darn obnoxious to all the haters (and the liars and the dirty dirty cheats in this world who could have been getting down to this sick beat), I realize, but for the rest of us, it was a beautiful display of community and solidarity, and so much fun. It was music in my mind saying it’s gonna be alright.
So yes, I cried when her engagement news dropped. (I don’t claim to be sane or level-headed. The last ten years have broken me into pieces.) I love her. I love her happiness. I love how my daughters love her, and I love that we can love her together.
September 15, 2025
Ripeness, by Sarah Moss
This is not a review. I’m still piecing together my experience of reading RIPENESS, the latest novel by Sarah Moss (out now in Canada), whose work I fell in love with through her three short novels, GHOST WALL, SUMMERWATER, and THE FELL. Her most release is the memoir MY GOOD BRIGHT WOLF, about her childhood and more recent experiences with anorexia. And now RIPENESS, a novel-sized novel, but which rips apart convention regarding structure. The very first sentence is, “Yes, Edith says.” Quotation marks done away with, long long paragraphs, dialogue within those paragraphs, the novel comprising two sections whose relationship is hard to discern, except that they are both about Edith, one (in third person) set in the present where Edith is around 70, divorced, living a comfortable life in Ireland, and the other (first person) about Edith’s experience in the 1960s on the cusp of adulthood travelling to a villa in Italy to spend time with her older sister, a ballerina, who is waiting out the final weeks of an unwanted pregnancy.
How do these two sections knit together? The answers to that question are not straightforward, but they’re interesting, even if I’m not sure what they are yet. How does the story of her sister’s child connect to Edith’s friend’s discovery in the present that her mother had once given up a child long ago, a son who was raised in America and who is returning to Ireland, a place to which he feels he belongs? A place to which Edith, who is Edith, will never belong. Edith an exile who is the child of an exile, her mother a Jew who was the sole member of her family to survive the Holocaust when she was sent to the British midlands just in time. How does all this connect to the Ukrainian refugees who’ve made their homes in Ireland, and the less familiar-seeming refugees from other places whom Edith’s neighbours resent and wave placards against?
There is all this and so much more, so much ripeness—the fruits on the trees in Italy, the very pregnant Lydia, Edith at the beginning of her experience just before she goes to study at Oxford. There is no sex for young Edith, but plenty for Edith in the present day (she utters the first line in the midst of it). A study of maternal ambivalence, of bodies, of citizenship, of youth, and age, and fathoming unfathomable things. RIPENESS is a novel about saying YES, and also saying no, sometimes. About life, and consequences, and I need to read it again in order to fully understand it, but the point is that I want to.
September 10, 2025
A Sense of Things Beyond, by Renée Belliveau
Who gets to remember in war? Who gets to be remembered? And how does that remembering perpetuate the very narratives that makes war possible (and often likely) in the first place? These questions and more are at heart of A Sense of Things Beyond, the second novel by Renée Belliveau, whose fiction is informed by her work as an archivist, and who I had the good luck of being able to work with in the early stages of this book. It tells the story of two people in the early 1920s who are struggling to move forward from their experiences in WW1, especially since those experiences fail to conform with the simplistic and conventional narratives of war and all its glory.
Rose was a nurse who worked on the front lines, who enlisted from her home in Toronto with pride at lending her skills to a cause she believed in, along with her fellow Canadians fighting on the side of righteousness. For Frederick, who Rose has met once before (his brother is married to her sister), things are more complicated. He’s studying languages in Berlin when Archduke Franz Ferdinand is assassinated, and has come to think of Germany as his home, which means he stays too long once war is declared and spends the duration as a civilian detainee at the Ruhleben internment camp, an experience with its own trauma inherent, but nobody around him sees it that way afterwards. Some even think he got off easy because he never had to fight, and he makes his case even less sympathetic by refusing to demonize the Germans as an enemy. He’d been there when the war ended, saw the people of Berlin starving and suffering, and he refuses to mark a line between “us” and “them.”
Which makes sense to Rose, who has seen what war does to bodies, who knows it happens to bodies on both sides, who has seen the mud and seen the death, and knows that stories of heroism are mostly just myths. She has seen also the way that stories like hers have been left out of the narrative, and stories of colonial soldiers who were people of colour, and has lost faith that people like her beloved nephew died for a reason. And so when she connects with Frederick at his home in Nova Scotia while she’s visiting her sister’s family, a romance grows between them, and both of them are force to face the hard experiences they’ve been trying not to think about since war ended. And only once they’ve finally done that can Rose and Frederick begin to face a future, maybe even one together…
This is a novel that brings history to life, that brings untold stories into consciousness, and complicates the way we think about war and remembrance. At a moment when military conflict is all too common (and more dangerous than ever), we need stories like this one to remind us of what it is to be human.
September 8, 2025
Taking Stock for September
Making: plans to get the word out about and celebrate my new novel, DEFINITELY THRIVING
Getting: cozy in my cardigan. Summer is not hanging around this year!
Cooking: Nothing at the moment, but Smitten Kitchen’s pasta salad with roasted carrots and tops is on the menu for the tonight!
Sipping: Tea sweetened with honey, because there was just the littlest bit left in the jar. I learned this trick from Jen Knoch—pour tea into the jar to get the dregs. Preventing food waste is delicious.
Reading: Ripeness, by Sarah Moss. I just started it this morning so am still just on the opening pages.
Waiting: for tonight, like Jennifer Lopez, but also differently, because I’m going to see Miriam Toews at the Toronto Reference Library.
Looking: At the trees outside my kitchen window which are suddenly turning autumnal (and I don’t hate it).
Listening: The sound of kids on the street outside. And someone operating a power saw. There is a bylaw in my neighbourhood that someone must always be operating a power saw or a leaf blower. If this wasn’t happening, we might all die.
Wishing: That everybody everywhere could find a little bit of peace in their hearts.
Enjoying: That my youngest child now makes her own way to school. I thought it would be hard to lose the framework of school walks, but it’s freed up so much time.
Appreciating: That both my children are happy at school.
Eating: Ripe pears. So good.
Liking: My new jeans, which are the first high waist jeans I’ve ever had? And they’re so comfortable and look great.
Loving: The sunshine on my garden.
Buying: Or ATTEMPTING to buy warm pjs for my kids at the new LL Bean. We’re going camping this weekend and neither of them have suitable sleepwear. Wish me luck.
Managing: the epic task of making sure all the produce gets eaten during the most delicious season in Ontario. This requires washing all the fruit, keeping fruit bowls filled, making sure the basket of grapes does not get lost in the back of the fridge, yelling at everybody to EAT THE STONE FRUIT. It’s a full time job. I’m not sorry.
Watching: I went to the movies on Friday and saw The Roses and loved it so much.
Hoping: that Lake Ontario is not too cold this weekend and I can ENJOY a swim (which is different than having a swim and not enjoying it, but I’ll take that too…)
Wearing: I’ve told you already, but my new jeans and a cardigan (and I do so delight in how the world is so Taylor Swift Folklore now and “August” turns to “Cardigan” as the month ticks over…)
Following: Fix the News! It’s the best. Read about the decline of mother to child HIV transmission in Botswana since 2000. It will blow your mind!
Noticing: That not enough people marvelling at decline of mother to child HIV transmission in Botswana. Guys. Get on it.
Sorting: Oh gosh, not enough. Sock and underwear drawer desperately needs it.
Coveting: New Taylor Swift album! And Olivia Colman’s wardrobe in The Roses
Feeling: Pretty good!
Hearing: Thumps through the wall from the house mine is semi-detached to. None of us are alone in the world.
September 8, 2025
Preorder Rewards
Thanks to everyone who helped celebrate the cover reveal for my novel DEFINITELY THRIVING, coming to Canadian and US readers from House of Anansi on March 17, 2026.
We have created the most adorable reward for everyone who places a preorder… (Preordering=heading to your favourite bookselling place—online or IRL—and ordering the book in advance of publication.)
If you preorder today, you’ll be securing something lovely for future-you(the novel itself!), but I will sweeten the deal for you-right-now with these adorable DEFINITELY THRIVING stickers (based on @melanielambrick’s cover illustrations) to express my thanks for your support.
Preorder DEFINITELY THRIVING wherever books are sold, and then email me a proof of purchase AND your mailing address to klclare AT gmail DOT com, and I will pop these beauties into the post for you. Those books! That cat! That declaration, ironic or otherwise, that you are DEFINITELY THRIVING. You know you want it…
About DEFINITELY THRIVING: The heartening and hilarious story of a woman who doesn’t have it all figured out just yet.
After accidentally-on-purpose exploding her listless marriage by being discovered in bed with the next-door neighbours, Clemence Lathbury returns to her hometown resolved to build a life for herself that is good and substantial, to become the kind of sensible woman who won’t be distracted by frippery and romance. It’s supposed to be Eat, Pray, Love, without the love part. But no woman is an island, and soon Clemence finds herself embroiled in neighbourhood drama; beginning a crusade at the local bookshop; becoming adopted by a well-groomed, one-eyed cat; and being forced to admit her attraction to two very different men—each a romantic lead in his own right. But how to choose? And never mind the complications of her quirky family …
A novel about friendship, community, and church jumble sales, Definitely Thriving is a celebration of people who are perfectly imperfect, and all the love and support that’s required for one woman to make it on her own.
*Thanks to @stuart.lawler for sticker design!
September 5, 2025
Rufous and Calliope, by Sarah Louise Butler
When I reviewed Sarah Louise Butler’s beautiful debut novel The Wild Heavens—about a quest to prove the existence of the Sasquatch—in 2020, I wrote, “it’s less about the finding than the searching, about the wonder instead of answers, about the stories we tell about the mysteries both of ourselves and of the world.” Her new novel, Rufous and Calliope, seems like a different kind of story on the surface, not a mythical creature in sight, but it similarly blurs the lines between fact and fiction, fancy and reality, and is wholly under the spell of its vivid natural setting deep in the rugged British Columbia interior.
The novel begins with Rufous, in his forties, suffering from a degenerative neurological disorder. His hold on the present is tenuous, and he’s had to give up driving, leave his job as a cartographer, and the novel finds him on an epic quest across the landscape to return to the treehouse where he and older his siblings made a home for themselves for a season when he was five years old, after the death of their grandmother. And as Rufous walks, the narrative moves back those enchanted days when he and his siblings were ever skirting the authorities who would have brought them into the child welfare system, but he felt cared for, and everything was infused with a magical sense of freedom. But the season came to an end through circumstances that are not delineated until the end of the story, Rufuous’s siblings leaving him the care of a lesbian couple in a small town who run a cafe, and he grows up loved and cared for, but the loss of his siblings wears heavy on his soul and is as conspicuous as the missing little finger on his hand.
What was the cataclysmic event that tore the family apartment? Whatever happened to Rufuous’s twin sister, Calliope? And what’s really going on with Rufous in the present as he makes his way along the route back to the treehouse? Is he actually going to find his siblings there, or is this just another of his delusions and hallucinations, manifestations of the crumbling in his mind? His decline mirrored in the ecological devastation all around him, the wildfire smoke particles he breathes in all along the journey.
Does this sound bleak? Its not, not really. There are harsh truths that are central to the story—death, and loss, and heartache. But these are balanced out by other things that are just as true, examples of care, friendship, extraordinary survival, wonder at the nature and the mysteries of the universe. What an incredible book.
September 3, 2025
Snap, by Susin Nielsen
A picture book I really love is AUTHOR’S DAY, by Daniel Pinkwater, which is perhaps truest to the experience of being a writer in public as anything I’ve ever read, the story of a children’s book writer who shows up to a school visit and is met with one abject humiliation after another, to the obliviousness of school staff, and it’s an experience like that—no doubt somewhat universal—is the catalyst for SNAP, the first novel for adults from celebrated and award-winning author Susin Nielsen.
Frances Partridge is smack-dab in the worst year of her life: her children are grown, prickly and difficult; she feels like she’s losing her mother to dementia; and her husband has left her, out of the blue, after 25 years of what she’d always believed as a happy marriage. And so when an adolescent boy starts harassing her during a school visit where she’s reading from her beloved middle grade series, Phoebe Unknown, Frances—on her last nerve—is not having any of it, and tells him what she really thinks…while his classmate is filming the whole episode, the video going viral within hours, and soon Frances has being dumped by her publisher and charged with assault on a minor among the series of disasters that have befallen her lately.
SNAP is the story of what happens next, when Frances is sentenced to community service and an anger-management class during which she finds an unexpected connection to two of her classmates, and after some frustration and much humour, their lives become transformed. It’s a hilarious and heartwarming story of justice and vengeance (and very annoying lapses in swimming pool etiquette), and I loved it through and through.
September 1, 2025
This Summer…
This summer was just the best. I was blessed with so many swims, good friends, great reads, fun road trips, fresh peaches, antihistamines, long days, cool nights, swift bike rides, plays, movies, even a baseball game (what?), gorgeous blooms in my garden, and corn for sale by the side of the highway. This summer was a work of art, and I’m a little bit proud of it, because I planned/booked everything back of January/February, when such a thing as summer was hard to believe in, and now it’s just in the rear-view, and oh, I loved it all. And now? Ready for the August-to-Cardigan transition…
August 25, 2025
More Summer Reading
If someone wrote a book about MY summer, it would be awfully boring to read about—all glory, no drama—but oh how lovely it’s been to experience. Last week we spent another beautiful holiday lakeside, and there was so much time for everything—being a little bit bored, even. We watched a movie every day and one day even watched two (Jaws and Puss in Boots—an incongruous mix but the latter was a nice palate cleanser). And of course, there was reading.
I started off with THE HOMEMADE GOD, which is the first book I’ve ever read by Rachel Joyce, and while it didn’t blow my mind, I enjoyed it, and the depiction of the lake in particular (and swimming) made this a very good book with which to kick off my holiday, even though my lake was in Haliburton instead of Italy. It’s the story of four adult siblings from London whose lives have been defined by their father, a middle-brow but very famous artist, and how their messy arrangements and understandings are turned upside down when he marries an enigmatic woman in her 20s, and then winds up dead at his Italian villa not long after, and his purported final painting is nowhere to be found.
Next, I read THE UPSTAIRS HOUSE, by Julia Fine, which came into my life in the most beautiful way. I happened to be in a bookshop a few weeks ago and picked up this book for absolutely no reason at all, and ITS PREMISE WAS A POSTPARTUM WOMAN WHOSE HOUSE IS HAUNTED BY THE GHOST OF MARGARET WISE BROWN. I mean, WHAT?? Could there BE a more perfect premise for a book? And how did I never hear about it, and can you imagine if I’d never picked up that book at all and shared a timeline with a novel about a postpartum woman whose house is haunted by the ghost of Margaret Wise Brown and never ever read it? I cannot imagine a greater tragedy. Even better, the book was WONDERFUL, dark and literary, about an academic whose thesis on Margaret Wise Brown and her influence by modernists like Gertrude Stein is put on hold by the birth of her first child, and things get weird after that, the novel itself haunted by Good Night Moon (itself a ghost story, if you read carefully) and The Runaway Bunny, and like any good writer herself influenced by Margaret Wise Brown, Fine resists an ending that doesn’t unsettle somewhat. This book was terrific.
And then I picked up REAL TIGERS, by Mick Herron, the third novel in his Slow Horses series, which I’m really enjoying (and it’s been reported to me by reputable sources that the TV show is even better than the book!). The series subverts spy tropes (among many tropes) and is so interesting for that, though sometimes the narrative gets very in the weeds and I’m a bit lost, which doesn’t bother me so very much (this is the case for me and any spy or mystery novel, to be honest). Anyway, I’m a fan and will keep reading—though my husband is two books ahead of me and maybe read too many at once, and suggests I space them out a bit, because it’s possible to have too much of a good thing.
And then GOD HELP THE CHILD, by Toni Morrison, which kind of cemented the theme of moral ambiguity in my reading list, as all of Morrison’s works do, blurring firm lines adhered to by people who are too fond of certainty. It’s the story of Bride, born to a mother who is shocked by the blackness in the hue of her skin, and brings her up with emotional deprivation to train her for a world that is going to be hard on her, another novel that subverts the readers understanding of good and evil (that last line! Absolutely haunting…) and maybe this is the first time a reviewer has compared Toni Morrison with the Slow Horses books, but both are utterly uninterested in making their readers comfortable or confirming anything.
And then I read MS. DEMEANOR, by Elinor Lipman, whom I’ve never read before, but I found this one in a booksale earlier this year and have been saving it for a holiday. Unlike THE UPSTAIRS HOUSE, this is a not a novel whose central appeal lies in its premise, if only because the narrative is all over the place (which is kind of ironic for a story about house arrest). It’s about a woman who gets caught having sex with a junior colleague on the rooftop deck of her Manhattan apartment, subsequently losing her job and being sentenced to six months of house arrest, but it’s also about love, Polish aristocrats, 19th century cookbooks, twins and sisterhood, and the possibilities for redemption. I devoured it, and it reminded me of Laurie Colwin, which is the highest literary praise I know how to deliver.
Next up was THE BOARDING HOUSE, by William Trevor, whose novels have been a summer staple of mine ever since I bought a used copy of his 1971 novel MISS GOMEZ AND THE BRETHREN for 10 cents in the Presquille Provincial Park park store. His works are so wicked and irreverent, his earlier books in particular, a bit of a Muriel Spark presence of the devil sensibility (Toni Morrison would concur). This 1965 novel was his third book, the story of a ragtag group of tenants in a London boarding house whose plans go awry when the owner of the house suddenly dies and his will leaves two very incompatible tenants in charge of everything—a surefire recipe for chaos, which transpires. My one reservation about this book was the single character of colour, a Nigerian man called Mr. Obd, who is not gifted the same complexity as his fellow characters, who is rendered simple and childlike (and his physical features drawn in racist terms). It made me think a lot because ALL the characters in this book were hideously flawed, so in a way Trevor’s portrayal is a kind of equality, but Obd doesn’t get to be human in the same way, is a collection of cliches (and also the novel’s ending doesn’t serve him). This is not a reason to not read this book, which is such a wickedly good one, but it’s definitely grounds for thoughtful critique (and this is a problem I find it almost any British novel from its time which acknowledged that Black people even existed).
And then the sweet treat of a book by Mhairi McFarlane, who is one of my favourite romance novelists, her books having a wonderful complexity and depth of character. Between Us was published in 2023, the story of a school teacher whose writer boyfriend’s TV series has been enormously successful, and she wonders if this is part of the reason why their relationship feels stale, or if it would have happened anyway after a decade together. And then she watches the pilot of his new show and discovers painful details from her personal life have been included in the story, and other details make her wonder if she really ever knew him at all—but also a break-up would destroy their longtime friend group and she might be left with nothing. All of which is complicated when she’s called back to her hometown to help out in her mother’s pub, stirring up the same memories provoked by what she’d seen in the show, and making her face things she’s been hiding from since her childhood.
Followed by WE ARE LIGHT, by Gerda Blees, which I bought on impulse at a bookshop in Bancroft while we were away, and it’s a fascinating book, translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison, based on a true story about a commune whose members attempt to live on light and air, foregoing food, which leads to one member’s death, which is where the book begins, and the narrative uses the language of the commune of collectivity and oneness to tell a story where each chapter begins with “We are ——”, beginning with “We are night” and concluding with “We are light,” the story told from that precise point of view (which includes that of a pen, a pair of socks, the scent of oranges, the neighbours, the dead woman’s family, the detective investigating whose own daughter is suffering with anorexia which gives her work a personal edge). There is a whimsical element to the approach, but the care and precision of the perspective means there is nothing “light” about it. This is a novel about truth, understanding, perspectives, meaning-making, and also connection, the necessity of the WE (but also it’s limits). Did I buy this book because the cover fit into the very orange palette of most of my reading (DAMN YOU, MICK HERRON.) Perhaps I did, but I’m so glad I did. This was an illuminating and surprising read, and a reminder that reading off the beaten track is so often incredibly rewarding.
And my ninth book was THE MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR AT STYLES, by Agatha Christie, our audiobook for the car journey, which (as usual, being no Poirot) I was completely confused by before the big reveal, but I enjoyed the ride all the same.
