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 6, 2026
Saudade, by Thomas Trofimuk
As a reader who skipped all the poems in A.S. Byatt’s Persuasion, just say, or who sees a long passage in italics coming in a novel and tends to head for the hills, I might have been taking a chance with Thomas Trofimuk’s sixth novel, Saudade, which is the story of a man whose wife tells him long stories full of digressions as a way to to hide from death. But see, I’d previously had the experience of being absolutely captivated by Trofimuk’s last book, which was narrated by a bridge (you read that correctly), so I had more than a little faith in the author and was willing to follow him wherever the story would take me.
Which is sort of the point of Saudade, actually, about Bruce Flynn, whose anxiety about death is being met by his wife Pilar’s theory that by focusing intently on deeply digressive stories, death won’t be able to find you. And one day while the two are travelling in France, in the middle of one such story, Bruce looks across the table to find that Pilar has disappeared, and thus begins a cross-continent quest to find out where she’s gone, the answer lying deep inside one of her stories inside stories inside stories. And all Bruce has to do is follow the clues, which become curiouser and curiouser, people he encounters on his journey seeming to be people from the story Pilar told, some of the connections uncanny, impossible, and then eventually it becomes clear that Bruce’s journey to find Pilar is actually a different kind of journey, but one no less wrenching, strange, and hard to navigate.
I’ve never read anything else like it. Saudade is unforgettable, a story of longing, grief, love, and marriage, as well as faith and friendship. It’s so weird and so good, and Trofimuk is a storyteller of such consummate skill that the reader is left totally spellbound.
July 2, 2026
The Seas, by Samantha Hunt
I’ve been waiting to read The Seas, by Samantha Hunt, ever since Mikka Jacobsen championed it on my podcast as book about a woman wildly wanting, longing. And feeling as I do about water and seas, albeit inland ones, I was drawn to this story of a woman who is sure she’s a mermaid, although her grasp on reality is dubious—or is it? A fairy tale, a fable, I read this short novel with Dar Williams’ song “The Ocean” in my head, a perfect complement, a song I used to listen to in the throes of unrequited love, which is where Hunt’s narrator finds herself too, infatuated with an Iraq war veteran who is only a little less too old for her now that she’s finally come of age. She lives in a seaside town so far north that all the highways run south, a place whose main claim to fame is its rates of alcoholism, and she and her mother are waiting for her father to return from the sea that took him years ago. Weird, wild and spellbinding, I really liked it.
June 29, 2026
Tilt, by Emma Pattee
I don’t ask for much from a camping trip—just perfect weather, and an absolute banger of a read selected from a bookshop en-route to the campground. This time it was Beach Reads Bookshop in perfectly delightful Port Dover, where Robyn’s pick—Tilt, by Emma Pattee—totally made my weekend.
Set in Portland, Oregon, it’s the totally gripping story of Annie, nine months pregnant and shopping for a crib in Ikea—she’s left it too late, as usual—when an earthquake hits, when THE earthquake hits, the big one that’s long been expected but which no one wants to think about. And the novel is about Annie’s journey through the wreckage of the city as she tries to find her husband, the journey alternating with chapters that tell the story of how Annie got here, her dreams, disappointments and compromises, a life she’d never expected when she was young and fresh and being promised that she could accomplish anything she set her clever mind to.
There was a point around the campfire when I was reading Tilt and I was almost in pieces, and my husband said to our eldest, “If this is hitting her this hard, the book must REALLY be brutal.” Because both of them have had the experience of me foisting books upon them by exclaiming, “Read this. It’s GREAT!” and they come back having finished the book and are totally destroyed, asking, “Why did you do this to me?”
Which brings me to the line in Tilt book where Annie notes that there are two kinds of people: the kind who make lists of all the ways a baby might die, and everybody else. (Annie also notes she and her husband never got around to making an earthquake preparedness kit, which was relatable. I don’t like to ground my anxiety in the physical world, preferring to keep it squarely in my head, which makes me feel safer somehow.) I’m definitely among the former group of people, although I don’t think this is the kind of book that will necessarily destroy you—although what do I know? I’m still sorry to anyone who was upset after I told them to read A Heart that Works, by Rob Delaney. I thought it was gorgeous and funny. Sad, but also true and gorgeous and funny.
What I don’t tend to gravitate toward are books that anyone might compare to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, however, and Tilt might be the one exception to that, mostly because Lydia Kiesling called it, “The Road meets Nightbitch meets What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” and how can you not be intrigued by that kind of mash-up?
I loved this book. I loved Annie’s voice, her compassion, its limits, her humour, her honesty. I love the way the narrative gripped me and didn’t let go. How the novel’s broad scope manages to contain such a massive spectrum of the human experience—the awesomeness of being alive, the terrible and terrific risk of falling in love and wanting, the devastation of realizing just how fragile all this, the very foundations on which we construct our measly existences, and the way we’d do so again and again. What a gift and what a burden it is to be human. How hard we can fight to survive.
June 25, 2026
On Witness and Respair, by Jesmyn Ward
“Come take a ride with me, them Southern boys said, them bluesmen made new. For sure, we answered, we coming, and for a song, a poem, a line, this country and history and the universe rearranged itself, and we were outside of time and space in a different place, crafted and built, paint stroke by poem and prose line by song lyric by music note by shutter click, in another dimension, where we were safe and seen and heard, where our hearts beat wildly and surely with the rhythm, with the rush of the water, with our ancestors at the oars of the boat, their own vessel, cutting through the waters of time, navigating the universes as they would.”
In her latest book, a collection of essays and articles written and published over the last 20 years, Jesmyn Ward resists the simplicity of a single story—about Mississippi, America, Black culture and more—and manages to hold it all, the tragedy and the ecstasy, the devastation and the building, the sadness and the joy, the cruelty and injustice and the overwhelming love.
June 22, 2026
Every Lie I Told, by Hilary Davidson
I’m looking forward to helping New York-based Canadian author Hilary Davidson welcome her latest novel into the world this Thursday June 25 at Ben McNally Books here in Toronto at 5pm. I’ll have the pleasure of interviewing Hilary about this latest twisty (and twisted!) thriller, a deep dive into the PR industry and all its depravities. The story begins with PR star Jackie Swift receiving a call from her troubled sister late one night—she’s at Jackie’s former boss’s house and requires Naloxone. But when Jackie arrives at the house, her sister is nowhere to be found, and her boss—a man who’s caused a lot of harm but to whom Jackie owes deliverance from her hardscrabble background—is dead. Who killed him? Where is Jackie’s sister? For once in her professional life, Jackie is not in control of the narrative at all, and needs to confront ruthless choices she’s made in her own past if she has any hope of saving her sister, and herself. This one is an absolutely wild ride.
June 19, 2026
Like a River Divides the Earth, by Dora Dueck
I was intending just to read the first page when I picked up Like a River Divides the Earth last week, looking for a taste of what expect from this book, one of my most anticipated reads of the season, but then I started reading—”I was fourteen before I saw my father’s face. The ruins, I mean, the face behind the mask. Holes instead of a nose. Dark holes in a pink crater of pulled-tight skin running from cheekbone to cheekbone, though the tip had been spared and stood there by itself, pale and hideous, as if too stubborn or stupid to quit when abandoned, Nostrils like tiny arches. And where his left eye should have been, he had a crater too.”—and that was it, really, for the next 56 pages, the first story, “Mask,” which unfolded like a novel, rich and detailed, taking place over decades and continents. Just like the four stories that follow in the collection, it was absolutely exquisite.
Long short stories are not always my jam, but when the writing, plotting and characterization are as rich as Dueck’s, the reading is easy, even when the subject matter is heavy and hard. The stories are various, which means each one feels like a wonderful dive into its own universe, stories with wide scopes, most of them hearkening to and from a pivotal moment in which a lifetime is riven in two, as per the collection’s title.
In “Mask,” it was that moment when the daughter accidentally sees her WW1 veteran father bare-faced, his gruesome injuries on display, and how she never tells her mother what she’s seen, not understanding the dynamics of her parents’ complicated relationship but knowing that saying nothing was safer. In “Blue,” it’s a somewhat (maybe?) innocuous gesture within a Golden Girls’ style house-sharing relationship between four older women that makes the drowning death of one of them even harder to fathom; in “Her Own Self,” a bereaved mother’s feeble act of vengeance haunts her for decades to come; “The Ragatta” is a curiously framed story from the point of view of a grief counsellor whose one visit from a woman lingers in the mind; and finally the title story, one of the two in this collection about Mennonite history (both are set among communities hoping to escape Soviet Russia in 1929/1930), this one about a man betrayed by a love, by his neighbours, and forced to survive the unimaginable who is rankled by notions of history as an abstract distant thing.
Getting lost inside these stories is a transcendent experience. Dora Dueck is a marvel.
June 18, 2026
The Art of Looking Back, and Women Among Monuments
“Sometimes I felt his gaze on me as I rode my bike to work, sat at my desk thinking my way into poems, and later, much later, drank coffee by our woodstove in a beautiful silk robe given to me by a wonderful woman, a robe he never saw. I felt his gaze pinning me to paper like a bright butterfly. For years afterwards, a gaze followed me, whatever I did. “A coy black-haired girl wearing a vermilion red gown, on a green mauve ground with a pale summer green light from a window” (May 22, 1982). I was never her, never had a vermilion gown in pale summer light, and I never knew I could refuse the gaze. Until he was dead and I was too old.” —Theresa Kishkan
Never have there been two better suited literary companions than The Art of Looking Back: A Painter, an Obsession, and Reclaiming the Gaze, by Theresa Kishkan, and Kasia Van Schaik’s Women Among Monuments: Solitude, Permission, and the Pursuit of Female Genius, two works of nonfiction almost uncannily in conversation. Kishkan’s memoir is a deep study of her experience as a painter’s subject many years ago, when she was on the cusp of her whole life, and may or may not have had the agency she thought she did. One of the portraits now hangs on the landing in her home, and in this book, Kishkan is in conversation with her younger self, who’d never known that the gaze could be refused. Though perhaps her first notion of this began with a trip to Greece she writes about, to the Acropolis, and the Karyatids, statues of five women that for Kishkan became “profound emblems of strength.”
She writes, “Their bodies were foundational structural, they were not the objects of anyone’s gaze, or if they were or had been, it was immaterial after 2,500 years. Their own eyes were far-seeing. Their clothing loosely fit their strong bodies, one leg taking the burden of the building’s weight, that leg bent forward to demonstrate their strength. From behind I could see the intricate braiding of their long hair, thick and bold, serving to enforce the strength of their necks as they supported the burden of the entablature.”
In Women Among Monuments, Van Schaik questions why such monumental women are so rare, and why when we do encounter them, they’re as symbols of virtues rather than representative of actual historical people, object instead of subject. Her memoir is a record of a variety of experiences, among them Van Schaik as a young womn, devoting herself to studying the work of great artists, replicating their artworks. “As I sketched…I wondered what effect replicating all these paintings by men had on my brain. How was it shaping the way in which I women? I hadn’t learned about the male gaze yet, though I had experiences it, both as an obhject of it, but also inwardly, within my own mechanics of looking… All around me I could sense an ambient desire and disgust for women’s bodies. At this point, it was more a feeling of unease and the study of perspective in art seemed to be compounding this self-interrogation. But even without the vocabulary, I was starting to question where I, or anyone like me, fitted in the history of looking.”
And both of these books are a continuation of such questioning, meditative, inspiring, generative, generous and powerful.
June 11, 2026
Cherry Beach, by Don Gillmore
“The city streets were like the forest in the ravine. There was a stillness and order to the untrained eye, but beneath that stillness was a furious cycle of growth and death and decay. People walked by containing guilt and fear and dreams of revenge. They carried debt and perversion and health scares and the sins of their fathers and the doubts of their children. Worlds sashayed by, unglimpsed. If we could see into the soul of everyone in the subway car with us, we wouldn’t be able to bear it.”
I loved this novel by Don Gillmore, set during a hot Toronto summer where things only get hotter after two teenage girls are found murdered in a St. James Town highrise. Cherry Beach is a story of the life of a city, and notions of justice, and who gets to decide, and police corruption, real estate (everything is about real estate) and a system that seems riddled with rot, right to the core. It’s also about alienation, loneliness, and longing, Gillmore’s Detective Jamieson Abel’s complicated humanity so deftly and subtly crafted.
June 9, 2026
Happy Pub Day to THE LOST SEASON
“When I picked up Fowles’ The Lost Season: A Memoir of Infertility, Motherhood, and the Worry and Work Demanded by Women, I’d understood the title to be a reference to those seven years, to the seven years it had (surprise!) taken Fowles to publish a book after becoming a mother, this book. And while “The Lost Season” does indeed refer to those years, the title means something different from what I’d anticipated, which had been the loss as a creative loss, time squandered that the artist will never recover, an account of the books that didn’t get written while she was busy changing diapers.
No, instead “The Lost Season” is a season of being lost, rather than a season of losing—save for the way Fowles had also lost herself, with everything that had previously anchored her identity and understanding of the world upended by the arrival of her daughter (not to mention years of struggling with infertility before that).
Which is not nothing, obviously—this kind of loss is terrifying and devastating—but there’s also nothing fallow about it, and the point of the book is that the creative seeds sown during those seven years, during that lost season, would turn out to be bountiful. And this is such a more interesting narrative than those affirming the standard line about motherhood and writing being incompatible, hybridity impossible, that every baby you have equals one less book.
Fowles pushes back on all this, her memoir opening with a powerful reclamation of not just mothers writing at all, but mothers writing about motherhood, and why such writing matters, never mind “the voices of literary men, or the anxious voice inside me that asks to be to be small and hidden, to pretend it doesn’t matter.”
She writes: My daughter is in every moment—every small, quiet, intimate thing. She is all the pieces of me, public and private, lost and found, broken and healed. And she is certainly in the writing. In every word.
*
Congratulations to Stacey May Fowles on the release of your memoir, and thank you for the inspiration that led to my “Hybrid Creatures” essay on Substack. This book is so good.
