May 25, 2026
The Great Good Places
I was late to Margaret Drabble, unsurprisingly, since she started publishing novels almost twenty years before I was born, and it was only when I was living in Japan in my 20s that I fell under their spell, battered copies of her Penguin paperbacks with their faded orange spines readily available at Wantage Book in Kobe. Already somewhat dated (see faded spines: Margaret Drabble had been so CURRENT in the ’60s, chief to her appeal!) but somehow also seeming as though they contained the universe, which felt timely, as at that moment I felt I was on the cusp of my own life, including the writing career I so desired. Drabble’s intimate portrayals of ordinary lives were so tied to huge societal and existential questions, constellations that I felt as though I could map and come closer to understanding everything.
When we left Japan, I insisted on sending all my books home by sea, which didn’t make much sense, financial or otherwise, but I didn’t want to part with them. Only now, more than twenty years later, have I been able to let them go for these beautiful editions that are for more readable, first editions, no less, acquired via my mom and her voluntary work for her local library’s book sale. There’s a line in Definitely Thriving where Clemence notes that the upside of women’s fiction being so devalued is that you can collect their first editions for a bargain. And maybe now that I am nearing fifty and have become challenged by the impossible type in mid-century paperbacks, these new-to-me editions will make rereading more palatable.
The Great Good Places, however, is a first edition Drabble that is new to me, signed no less, acquired on our trip to England this spring. It’s a collection of essays and stories from where Drabble sits in her late 80s, all of it with an autobiographical bent. She tells us that her 2016 book The Dark Flood Rises is her final novel, for the death of her daughter in 2017 left her unable to write fiction anymore. There’s a sadness permeating the collection, unsurprisingly, but still the same clarity and curiosity that makes her voice her own, a writerly voice that still compels me and likely always will.
May 22, 2026
American Fantasy, by Emma Straub
I’ve learned a lot from Emma Straub about the kind of books I want to write—her novel The Vacationers was the last book I finished reading before I sat down to begin my first novel, Mitzi Bytes, in 2014—and this is because hers are also the kind of books I most love to read. Light in the very best way, in a way that takes light seriously, this lightness coupled with real wit, and intelligence that’s equally matched with warmth. Her fictional worlds are a pleasure to get lost in, replete with complicated relationships, family drama, unanswerable questions, and a powerful poignancy.
And in American Fantasy, her sixth novel, she turns her discerning eye to notions of lightness, of pop, and escapism, all these factors melding into a plot about a nostalgia cruise ship for avid fans of a fictional has-been ’90s boy band, Boy Talk, including the boys themselves, now middle-aged, but sticking with their teenage dreams (and fans’ teenage screams) to pay the bills. The novel is told from the points of view of Sarah, head of the production team that runs the cruises with their over the top itinerary, who’s in no hurry to come home from sea after her girlfriend has just left her for a 23 year old dog walker named Plum; Anne, a 50-year-old divorcee who arrives onboard solo after her younger sister (for whom the cruise had been a birthday gift) is stuck home with a broken leg; and then Keith, one of the boys, one of the two who can actually sing, but he struggles with his demons, most of which involve his band-mate brother and his cold not-yet-estranged wife. Over five days, trapped in the unreality of the American Fantasy cruise ship, these three characters’ lives intersect in surprising and meaningful ways
Life is long and complicated, in a way that the lyrics to those ballads the boy bands sang (but didn’t write—and which fans can still immediately recall 30+ years later) never alluded to. American Fantasy is about how the reality never measures up to the promise, and what else might be possible in the space between.
May 20, 2026
Suddenly Light, by Nina Dunic
“Remembering my grip on her arms, hurting her, wanting to shake her, hard, so she would stop being drunk—wipe her face, so she could participate like the rest of us. Participate, like all of us. Didn’t she get it? We didn’t want to be here either. Somewhere between the turquoise eyes and the brown smear were the rest of us.”
Nina Dunic’s short collection Suddenly Light—which follows her award-winning debut novel The Clarion—troubles the space between people, ourselves and others, sometimes perfect strangers, and other times the people we’re closest to. A quiet sadness permeates these stories, but there are moments—like the title says—of powerful illumination, of sometimes fleeting connection. Though these moments are never the crux of things, because the point of Suddenly Light is that life goes on, much longer (and darker and harder) than anyone anticipates at the beginning of it all, when you’re young and on the cusp of everything, the future only possibility, no such thing as compromise. Narrative never quite unfolds the way we imagine it will, and Dunic’s stories show this, the ongoingness, the granular attention to detail, the strangeness and randomness, what participation requires of its players, how much is felt but never said.
May 12, 2026
The Things We Never Say, by Elizabeth Strout
Don’t let that Elizabeth Strout has followed up her novel Tell Me Everything with one called The Things We Never Say make you think she’s shifted gears. Although she’s left Maine behind, and the familiar cast of characters—Lucy Barton, Bob Burgess, Olive Kitteridge, and others—who’ve populated her stories over the past three decades are absent from the book. In fact, yes, The Things We Never Say seems set in a different universe altogether, one in which Strout’s beloved literary people, Bob et. al, are fictional (CAN YOU IMAGINE!?), because there’s a reference to her main character, Artie Dam, reading a book “about some crotchety old woman from Maine,” which is clearly Olive Kitteridge. “People die of loneliness,” Artie recalls the woman in the book thinking. “It happens all the time.”
But what this quotation reveals is that this latest book is still familiar territory for Strout, territory she’s mined before—the unknowability of other people, even those who are closest to us, how alone we can feel within intimate relationships, the depth of mystery contained within each and every one of us. This is territory that Strout will likely never stop mining either, which is fine with me, because what she writes reads like answers to questions I will never stop asking, and I’m glad she’s wondering too.
Artie Dam is a man akin to Bob Burgess, a man with feelings, many of which he’s unable to express. He’s a beloved high school history teacher and it’s 2024, which is a hard time to be a student of history in the United States of America, to have one’s eyes open to what’s happened and what’s going to happen next. The great heartbreak of his life is a car accident when his son was a teenager that killed his son’s girlfriend, and changed everything for their family, especially the dynamic between Artie and his wife. But then Artie learns something about his past that changes everything he thinks he knows about his family, and Artie has to figure out what happens to that, a problem that’s aligned with questions he keeps asking himself about the nature of free will.
This is a novel in which not much happens at all, or rather it happens in such a way that it’s easy to overlook that everything happens in this book, life, death, betrayal, heartbreak. But also redemption, hope, possibility, (sometimes) connection. This book is wrenching in the same way that being alive is, and similarly it’s so deeply worth the ride.
May 11, 2026
calling down the sky, by Rosanna Deerchild, translation by Solomon Ratt
“there is no word for what they did/ in our language/ to speak it is to become torn/ from the choking”
A perfect and poignant Mother’s Day read this weekend was the recently released 10th-anniversary edition of Roseanna Deerchild’s poetry collection calling down the sky, with a Cree translation by Solomon Ratt. The poems are in Deerchild’s mother’s voice and tell the story of her experiences of residential schooling with a simultaneous candour and remove (“people ask me all the time/ about residential schools/ as if it’s their business or something.”) Following the deaths of her parents, Deerchild’s mother attended 3 residential schools from the age of 5 to 14, where abuse and neglect were rampant, the trauma living deep in her bones ever since, manifesting in her health troubles and memories that are hard to face. These poems stare down the brutal realities of these institutions, the inhumanity baked into the system, the depravity and cruelty inherent in the quotidian experiences of the children who were forced to live there. But Deerchild also shows the subtle ways in which the children were able to exercise subversion where they can, the title poem about the night sky and the northern lights which the children know and understand due to their own knowledge of place, but “never seen/ that priest run so fast/ as though the devil himself was chasing.”
May 6, 2026
Welcome to Sunny Town, by Théodora Armstrong
Welcome to Sunny Town, by Théodora Armstrong, is the story of Maggie, a young artist stuck in her relationship and creative process who decides to broaden her horizons by moving to Japan to teach ESL in 2001. She joins an artist friend in Okayama and becomes part of the ESL expat community there, but eventually finds that the connections she’s making are somehow making her feel more lost than ever. After the Twin Towers fall in New York City that September, the world feels even more strange, Maggie’s Japanese life an unreality, and she must take stock of her present and her past in order to begin contemplating such a thing as the future.
I loved this book, partly for reasons that are personal. I too “taught” English in Japan not longer after the turn of the century and so the culture and dynamics Armstrong writes about were familiar to me and brought back so many memories—the obnoxious cultural superiority manifesting from all sides in conversation classes, Japanese housewives who befriend young gaijin as a hobby (I got “picked up” in the grocery store a few times), weirdo expats who’ve been in Japan for way too long, and (even worse) the ones who manage to escape and then find their way back again.
Armstrong also so perfectly captures the longing and pain of being in one’s 20s anywhere, realizing how little foundation any of us really have beneath our feet, recognizing our parents as flawed and human, putting too much effort into relationships unworthy of our energy, pushing everything (especially our limits) just a little too far simply to find out what happens if we do.
Welcome to Sunny Town is a Künstlerroman, a beautiful and tender portrait of womanhood and becoming. And while Maggie is a messy character, the narrative does not get bogged down in her boredom and ennui, as I’ve encountered (and been put off by) in other “messy girl lit,” too cool for school. Nope, Maggie dares to feel, to hope, to want, to create.
And to connect, most important of all, both with the world around her, and to the reader who’s lucky enough to pick this novel up.
May 5, 2026
Best Offer Wins, by Marisa Kashino
The most controversial thing I ever did in my life was have a baby before I’d bought a house, which is to say that I know the stakes for Margo Miyake, the protagonist of Marisa Kashino’s debut Best Offer Wins. She’s sick of the one-bedroom rental in Washington, DC, that she shares with her husband, Ian, and figures the stress of their uncomfortable living situation is part of the reason she can’t get pregnant. They’ve already lost out on eleven heartbreaking bidding wars, and so when she finds out about a perfect house that’s not on the market yet, she decides to get in first, ingratiating herself with the home’s current owners, keeping her machinations on the down-low, hoping they won’t find out what she’s really after.
If Margo’s desperation seems extreme, there’s a reason for it, the unstable childhood she clawed her way out of, thirsting for middle class respectability, and in her husband she’s found the promise of that—real estate is the final piece in her puzzle.
But of course Margo is also completely unhinged, the extent of this becoming clearer as the story unfolds. I had been expecting a story along the lines of The Hand that Rocks the Cradle or Single White Female, Margo worming her way into the another family’s household for the life she wants, but the family fast gets wise to her, and Margo needs to resort to even further extremes to fight for the house she’s determined in hers—and the terrifying thing about Margo is that she’ll stop at absolutely nothing.
I loved this book. There is something narratively admirable about Margo’s ruthlessness, if not morally (‘cuz she’s a psychopath!). Best Offer Wins is a propulsive and uncomfortable read, the latter for the relatability of it all—because how far would YOU go?
May 4, 2026
A False and Fatal Claim, by Iona Whishaw
Lane Winslow is back in Iona Whishaw’s latest mystery, A False and Fatal Claim, the fourteenth title in her bestselling series set just outside Nelson, BC, in the idyllic hamlet of King’s Cove. Which is where the story begins this time, not long after Lane’s sojourn to Mexico, when Lane is visiting the beach and discovers not a body (surprising!—or at least she hasn’t found a body YET) but a hat. Meanwhile, a motorboat has been reported missing, and so too has a local boy gone astray.
What connects these three events? And more importantly: where is the body? And whose will it be?
All of this intrigue is in addition to local excitement around the wedding of Sergeant Ames, and the usual small town gossip and shenanigans. Plus, Lane is charged for caring for the missing boy when he finally turns up, because it appears his mother has run off too, just to someplace different. And the boy offers her one of her biggest challenges yet, making her consider questions of nature and nurture and how the troubled boy’s difficult life has kept him from learning to make proper attachments and made him lash out at the least opportunity. (Whishaw’s previous career as a teacher, social worker, and school principal has informed this story-line to great effect.)
I’m also not one to put pressure on couples to have children (it’s not for everybody!) but I’ve been wondering whether Lane and Darling would—it’s been a while since their wedding and a baby could be a nice distract from the poetry manuscript that Lane is perpetually avoiding, not to mention a diversion from stumbling across bodies. And Whishaw drops some interesting breadcrumbs making me wonder if a pregnancy plot-line might indeed be on the horizon…
The setting is cozy, the characters familiar and beloved, the mystery itself twisty and interesting, and all of this is underlined by a gorgeous and satisfying foundation of justice and social justice—the story is set in 1948, but Whishaw’s characters push back against racism and sexism in a beautiful way. As with all the books in the series, which manage to remain vital and fresh fourteen books in, these cozy reads manage to suggest provocative answers to some of the most pressing questions of the moment.
April 28, 2026
Becalming, by Aga Maksimowska
Aga Maksimowka’s Becalming is a novel that complicates dualities in the most fascinating way. The story opens on a sailboat, waves slapping the sides, and Gosia (who otherwise knows a lot) can’t tell a rudder from a tiller, whereas her mother can, at home as the captain, and suddenly Gosia sees there’s another side to her mother, one that she’s never even glimpsed back in Canada. She tells us, “This isn’t Toronto Harbour; this is the Baltic, an arm of the Atlantic, the world’s youngest sea.”
Gosia has returned to Poland with her sister and her mother after living in Canada for decades, painstakingly making a life there, and now—age 30—she works as a teacher, she’s stable in her relationship with Peter. Or maybe too stable? There is something wild and hungry inside Gosia that Peter struggles to accommodate, and Gosia has found herself drawn to a work colleague, the appeal of the forbidden. But stability is appealing too, especially after a childhood where she was left by both her parents—her father for another wife, her mother who immigrated to Canada before Gosia joined her.
The sailboat is important—becalming is motionlessness from a lack of wind, which can sometimes mean relief. The word also is very close to “becoming.” There’s a whole lot going on her, and the depths get even murkier when revelations about Peter’s dying father suggest he wasn’t the perfect man the Gosia liked to suppose he was, the counterpart to her own absent father. And all the counterparts are all messed up anyway—why are her relatives in Poland now doing better than the Canadians in 2007? Is Gosia, drawn to her colleague, more like Peter’s father herself?
In Becalming, Maksimowska weaves a complex and beautiful web of connection and disconnection, then and now, here and there, plot and prose both turning surprisingly, creating a rich and textured portrayal of family, history, and real and messy love.
April 27, 2026
Go Gentle, by Maria Semple
“It’s hard to imagine another writer getting away with this kitchen junk-drawer of a novel,” writes critic Ron Charles of Maria Semple’s latest, Go Gentle, and Charles means it in the best way. Because this isn’t your mother’s kitchen junk drawer, or your own, or anyone’s, instead a junk drawer that could only belong to the wondrous mind of Semple, as brilliant as it’s squirrelly, her narratives prone to sharp turns and unlikely diversions. Stoicism, 1990s’ comedy writing rooms, #MeToo, motherhood, covens, art heists, weird rich people, Central Park, the Louvre, bomb threats, secret agents, divorce, hot sex, success, and failure.
Go Gentle is the story of Adorra Hazzard, a mid-life divorcee, and a Stoic philosopher who lives on New York’s Upper West Side and is populating the units in her apartment with like-minded women so that she can form a coven. But then she meets a man one night at the opera, and the whole world becomes unhinged after that, Adorra cut up in an international plot (or is she just imagining things) that somehow ties back to her earlier career as a comedy writer before sexual assault by a colleague and an NDA put an end to that part of her life for good.
If you’ve never read Semple before, you’ll likely read this book, and wonder what’s going on here, and I certainly did the same sometimes—Semple throws her reader into the deep end, no hand-holding, it’s up to us to find our bearings, and there were moments when I was lost and confused. There is such a breeziness to her narrative voice that I’m compelled to fly through it, but there is some method to the madness and details that need to be attended to. (Up until the novel’s last page, I’d missed the cameo from the protagonist of Semple’s breakout hit, Where’d You Go, Bernadette?)
I’m the last person to read Maria Semple critically—Bernadette was a game changer for me as both a reader and a writer, and I’d follow her sentences anywhere. I loved this book, because I love everything she does—and I’ve also found her weird twisty books give bang for their buck, just as revelatory and fun to read a second time.
