September 1, 2026
Cottage Reads 2.0
As I was somewhat disappointed in myself for my cottage book stack from July being so conventionally packed with new releases (which is not to say that The Shampoo Effect and Dolly All The Time are not incredible reads I now recommend to everyone—they are both SO GOOD), I decided to return to my own readerly foundation—PURSUE YOUR OWN CURIOUS AVENUES—for our most recent getaway. I love the challenge of putting together a book stack utterly unlike everybody else’s, off-beat and unexpected. A proper cottage book stack, to my mind, should be made up on books obtained in little free libraries, library book sales, or secondhand stores, preferably published in previous centuries. Front lists don’t belong at the lake.
And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie: This one came from our local Little Free Library, and was notable for being a book that every member of our family read on our week away. (Now that our youngest family member is 13, there are more of these and it’s delightful.) It all began when my eldest daughter, who is a murder mystery aficionado, read it, and was bowled over by the cleverness. She insisted that all of us had to read it so we could talk it with her, and perhaps the best part was everybody trying to predict the story’s outcome as they were reading and those of us who’d read it already replying, “Just keep going.” No one guessed the ending, which is remarkable for a novel wholly spoiled by its title.
A Mercy, by Toni Morrison: I loved this one, which I bought after it was selected as one of the New York Times’ best books of the century. Published in 2008, it’s set in the 1600s around the beginning of the slave trade, and the story of a young Black enslaved woman purchased by a man who’s ambivalent about slavery, and her connection to the wife of the man who buys her. While the story’s beginning is disorienting in its fragments, it actually comes together quite straightforwardly, and Morrison had tricked me into thinking I knew what to expect, which is never the case with any of her novels, steeped in a wonderfully throught-provoking moral ambiguity. What is the line between right and wrong, good and evil? Who gets to draw it. Troubling in the very best way.
Sisters By a River, by Barbara Comyns: A purchase from the Victoria College Booksale! I’ve read two previous novels by Comyns—Our Spoons Came From Woolworths and The Vet’s Daughter—and was curious about this re-release from Virago, her first book, a novel that’s really a collection of autobiographical vignettes from Comyns’ childhood with a father and mother who made Farve and Muv Mitford seem like helicopter parents. It’s a childhood of peril and cruelty, filled with nasty characters, and yet the narrative voice gives the whole thing a certain charm, which is the weirdest magic spell.
Temples of Delight, by Barbara Trapido: Trapido wrote the foreword to Comyns’ novel, so naturally I had to read her next. Barbara Trapido is such a strange writer, strange in a way I did not understand or appreciate when I read her the first time, appreciating something light and easy. And while there is indeed light and ease in Trapido’s work, there is also so much darkness, death, tragedy, dubious morality, and the contemporary English novel does not tend to be her template—I’ve actually already read the sequel to Temples of Delight, which was positively Shakespearean in its approach to theme and character, and this novel is a riff on The Magic Flute (although I cannot tell you how because I don’t know it). But oh, her work is wondrous to behold. I wish Trapido had been more prolific—I am sad that I only have one more of her novels before me. (Another Vic Booksale score!)
You Had Me At Hello, by Mhairi McFarlane: In some ways this one is the outlier of my stack, a contemporary rom-com, but there us something transgressive about how McFarlane pushes at the limits of the genre, making room for more, for deeper and sometimes darker storytelling, and besides this is her very first novel, and so backlist it is. And I loved it. McFarlane is one of my favourite chroniclers of modern life, of women’s friendships, and is oh so very funny, kind of my literary role model. An absolutely delight. (I found this one in my local LFL.)
The Knockout Queen, by Rufi Thorpe: Another more contemporary pick, the book Thorpe published before the smash hit Margo’s Got Money Troubles. It make think about my cottage stack and the common thread of people broken down by their lives and by society, and what happens when those people make the only choices they were ever going to make, which are the worst ones, ones with devastating consequences. (See Morrison!) Who are the freaks and monsters of the world, really? In some ways this is like a bizarro version of The Great Gatsby, set in the suburbs of Los Angeles, also troubling and violent, but utterly captivating and each of its broken messed up characters has incredible heart—but Thorpe pulls no punches either.
The Public Image, by Muriel Spark: This one was different from other Spark novels I’d read, seemingly more straightforward, less concerned with questions of religion and Catholicism that end up going over my heard anyway. But maybe not so straightforward after all because I gather that the protagonist was supposed to be a villain of sorts, a celebrity utterly consumed with her image to the point where she’s an empty shell, but I had real sympathy for her—perhaps the omnipresence of celebrity and fame in our current moment has normalized what’s wrong with her. She’s an actress of middling distinction who has ended up a genuine movie star, but then her less famous husband takes a vicious revenge. I don’t know if this is Spark at her best, but it was a good read anyway. (Another Vic Booksale find—and a North American first edition at that!)
Monkey Grip, by Helen Garner: I bought this one new awhile back, but it’s a reissue so you can’t fault me. A whole bunch of the Australian Garner’s books were republished recently, this one with an introduction by Lauren Groff. It’s set in the 1970s against a counter culture scene build on drugs and communal living, single mom Nora infatuated with the junkie Javo, and struggling to rectify her feelings of attachment to him with her desire to live freely. Her ambivalence is truly interesting, and while I tend to find narratives about people on drugs terrifically boring and parts of this were no exception to that rule, I really appreciated Nora’s story and Garner’s spare and unyielding prose, and how the novel connected to the questions of morality woven so interestingly into all the other novels I was reading.
Elizabeth Alone, by William Trevor: The Irish writer Trevor is most celebrated for his short stories, but the dark humour and rich poignancy of his early novels are my favourite, and this 1973 release was such a pleasure to read. Maybe I love Trevor because he writes women’s stories so beautifully, this one about four patients at a fiction London women’s hospital, the narrative weaving each of their stories and those of so many other characters in their lives, resulting in a tangled web of connections and disconnection, goodness and wickedness aplenty, and also grace. Rich and funny, so emotionally acute, and absolutely cutting.
(Bonus) The Unexpected Guest, by Agatha Christie: The audiobook we finished on the way home from our trip! We had an audiobook DNF on July’s journey, a book that was so long, and tended to send us to sleep, which was a problem if you’re driving a car. For this trip, we banked on a short book, a novel that was actually adapted from one of Christie’s plays. We loved it. And while the conclusion seemed to be settling into an unbearable predictability as we got closer to the end (which is what you get with a short mystery, perhaps, an uncomplicated wrap-up?), Christie swooped in with her plotting genius at the eleventh hour and blew our minds. SO GOOD!
August 21, 2026
A Literary Bouquet
I’ve been valuing the experience of a literary deep dive since two recent reads, but this doesn’t mean everything good requires deep immersion. At the same time, I’ve also been enjoying three other books in bits and pieces—a collection of short short stories, a poetry collection, and an essay collection—for the past few days, books that are in conversation with one another, and which probe mundanity in the wonderful sense of things of this world. These books aren’t just all about shiny things either (though there is much of this in each of them!), but instead grit, mud, mudslides, homeless encampments, racism, all of which are also things of this world, undeniably, and I think it’s these books’ capacities to hold all of it that really makes me believe in every word the authors say. Clear-eyed, wondering, wandering, curious—together a veritable literary bouquet.
- The Book of Delights, by Ross Gay
- A Mudlarker’s Diary, by Ariel Gordon
- Earthen, by Katherine Koller
August 19, 2026
Whistler, by Ann Patchett
It just so happened that I ran out of things to do on Friday afternoon, which is a situation that I don’t encounter very often, and it also just so happened that I had a hammock and a copy of Ann Patchett’s new book, Whistler, with which to fill that little window of time that had just opened in my life. I’d started reading Whistler the night before, and I was already in its thrall, and settled into my hammock to savour the rest, the experience recalling the time I barrelled through most of The Dutch House in the bathtub. And I can’t help but think that this is the best way to read Ann Patchett, to eliminate all other distractions and wholly submit to the narrative, letting the novel hold you, the way a bathtub or a hammock might. I don’t have a photo of the novel taken in the hammock, my feet popping up in the background to affirm that all this is a true story, because my phone was far away, and the story of Daphne’s encounter with an elderly man at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and everything that happened after that became my whole wide world.
I love this novel. It’s so strange, and slow, and breaks all the core rules of novel writing—especially TWO CHARACTERS TALKING ABOUT SOMETHING THAT HAPPENED DOES NOT MAKE A SCENE. The whole novel is characters talking about things that happened, things that happened decades ago but what makes it so compelling is the revelations that arrive with the telling, revelations that re-frame everything the characters thought they knew about themselves and each other.
And I think it’s a novel that really benefits from singular focus, from being able to sink deeply into it. (I liked Tom Lake a lot, but I was reading it in bits and pieces, and these novels are best appreciated as wholes.) Patchett’s narrative voice is one that holds the reader so carefully, precisely, assuredly—the same way that Daphne and her stepfather were held on a hillscape all those years ago, trapped in their car which had gone off the road, stopped midway down, the car on its side, and any sudden movement might trigger the car to roll further. The same way that Daphne is held by the story her stepfather tells her during that long night while they’re waiting for light. The same way that I was held by my hammock as I read Whistler last Friday, into the evening, absolutely riveted by the strangeness of the story, the unlikeliness and specificity that makes it read as true, that makes its ending simultaneously unbearable, and also one of the most glorious stories I’ve ever read in my life.
August 14, 2026
The Fall-Down Effect, by Liz Johnston
Last weekend—as wildfires continued to burn across British Columbia—was a strange and uncanny time to finish reading Liz Johnston’s debut novel, which ends with a 2020 forest fire forcing a fractured family back together again after decades apart. The story starts three decades before that, as homeschooling mother Lynn chafes at the smallness of her life raising her child in a small BC mill town, and longs for the purpose she’d found in her youth as an environmental activist in Vancouver. Her husband Tom, however, has wholly left that life behind, and worries about his wife exposing their children to off-beat ideas that will alienate and isolate them in their community.
The novel picks up again ten years later with Tom and Lynn separated and in new relationships, with their middle child, Fern, committing an act of violence in the name of environmental protection that tears their already-severed family even further apart. Fern goes on the run from authorities, while her siblings and parents (who are now separated and in new relationships) struggle among themselves to decide who’s to blame. Elder sister Sylvia’s in university studying forestry, younger brother River works as a tree planter, each of the siblings complicit in the system their sister has blown up her life to fight against, and also wise enough to know that that system, along with of notions and good and evil, is more complicated that Fern thinks that is. But is that really wisdom?
The Fall-Down Effect is not a novel that promises easy answers, or swift resolutions. The world, like the families that help comprise it, is messy and tangled, best intentions turning into disaster, good and evil intertwined, often irrevocably, and grace can be hard to come by. This is a book about both climate disaster and family disaster, the difficulty of engaging with reality as opposed to the stories we tell ourselves, and how it’s actually possible, if we open our minds, to learn to hold it all.
August 10, 2026
Waist Deep, by Linea Maja Ernst, translated by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg
Midsummer is an idyll, a shimmering dream-scape, mirage-like, impossible to hold, and in Waist Deep, the Danish novel by by Linea Maja Ernst, translated by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg, it’s a moment that awakens new and wondrous possibilities. A very loose modern retelling of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Waist Deep takes place at a Danish lake house where five university friends have reconvened with their partners and children, and Karen and Esben announce that the occasion is actually their wedding. For Sylvia, however, ensconced in a monogamy with her girlfriend Charlie, the news rekindles her feelings for Esben and the paths not chosen, and she articulates her disappointment in her friends for choosing convention and mediocrity when a decade before they’d all been intent on being radicals.
Over a week of swimming, sunbathing, talking, reading, and cooking together, the friends contemplate their connection and disconnection, a slow and dreamy narrative that’s also gorgeous and profound.
August 4, 2026
The Valley of the Vengeful Ghosts, by Kim Fu
There is something wonderfully inscrutable about Kim Fu’s The Valley of the Vengeful Ghosts, in the way that the metaphors aren’t metaphors. After the death of her mother, Eleanor follows her final wish and uses her inheritance to buy a house, the only house she can afford, a model home on the site of a cursed development that turns out to be shoddily constructed, the rain pouring in, the shower draining into the chandelier in the hallways. That the house is haunted turns out to be the least of the trouble, the ghosts being figments of Eleanor’s imagination, including people who are actually alive, the clients that Eleanor counsels through her work as a therapist for an online platform.
Things were not supposed to be like this. Eleanor’s story alludes to an assault during her graduate studies, a faculty member who was never held accountable, how Eleanor’s mother stepped in and wholly took over the management of her life as she lived in the aftermath of trauma, and became trapped in a depression and helplessness from which she’s never recovered, a kind of ghost (of) herself—though far from vengeful.
As the rains fall and the water rises, Eleanor’s model home become more and more permeable, the novel heading for an inevitable climax that manages to be surprising, to offer just the appropriate amount of grace. A lesser work would make all this a statement on real estate, capitalism, mental illness, loneliness, trauma, or some other such thing, but Fu’s novel manages to have created a novel that is firmly about itself.
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.
July 31, 2026
Good Company, by Kate Christensen
Kate Christensen’s new novel is a reckoning, and also a memoir disguised as a novel about a memoir. And as a novel Good Company is terrifically odd, but still most compelling, taking place over a weekend in which Julia Heimdahl, a midcareer writer in her 50s (whose biography resembles the author’s), attends a writers’ festival at her alma mater in the Pacific Northwest. She’s just published a memoir, which compiles her life’s most complicated relationships—with her difficult mother, her father who she witnessed beating her mother, old friends, boyfriends, her ex-husband, her new partner who’s a musician 20 years her junior. And she’s placed on a panel with a noted biographer who has recently published a memoir of his own, the vibes between them just a little off, which might have something to do with the allegations of historical sexual abuse that are on the verge of breaking.
The novel moves between encounters throughout the festival weekend—which end up resembling scenes from “This is Your Life,” past figures from Julia’s life most conveniently stepping into the story to have conversations that are conspicuously relevant to the novel’s central themes and ideas (it’s weird, but it works!) about gender, power, narrative, truth—and excerpts from Julia’s memoir. The latter underlines the ways in which Julia has made a point of being a cool girl throughout her life, someone who keeps up with the guys, who can write like a man (and also drink like one). And by the time Julia is telling her story now, she’s had enough therapy and reflection to understand how her difficult childhood helped to make her this way, but she’s not far enough along to know she can change.
Over the weekend, however, Julia begins to question her own complicity and complacency when it comes to terrible and/or predatory men, to acknowledge her own vulnerability, and confront the mixed messages she’s been receiving throughout her life about strength and power and femininity. Some of the literary figures in this novel are thinly disguised, which makes Good Company an especially juicy read, but it’s also powerful, moving, and incredibly profound.
PS I’ve been reading Christensen for a long time now, originally inspired by Maud Newton’s enthusiasm for her work. All these years later, it’s sometimes easy to forget how foundational Maud Newton’s blog was to me as an aspiring writer/literary person, a window into a world then that seemed so far away from mine.
July 29, 2026
A Study in Red, by Connie Gault
A Study in Red, by Connie Gault, begins after a hot summer night in 1962, and a man who is dead in the morning. The pieces of the puzzle, the mystery, not yet locked into place—there is a woman who is fleeing, leaving her life, moving to an isolated cottage in rural Saskatchewan, and she’s been given a new name. She’s dyed her hair even blonder, and the ladies in the salon say she looks like Marilyn Monroe, whose own death will come over the news wires shortly. Narrating her experience like a character in a film noir, Amy Bell tells the story of how Amy Bell came to be.
And in a more contemporary time, a writer called Carol is recalling that very same summer as she lives under the weight of Long Covid and learns that Hattie has died, her death reported in the New York Times. Hattie, a popular novelist whom Carol had known through her aunt. That fateful summer, Carol, her younger sister, and their mother, had come to stay with the aunt at Hattie’s compound north of Edmonton. (Hattie spent her winters in California.) Where there were cottages, a swimming pool, where 13-year-old Carol was becoming aware of lust and desire as she eavesdropped on adult conversations, and she witnessed something terrible that was never spoken of again.
In a novel that’s both mystery and meditation, Connie and Amy attempt to solve (and then ever complicate) the puzzle of what really happened that summer, that night. Following her Toronto Book Award-nominated The Rasmussen Papers, A Study in Red is an examination of sisterhood, memory, narrative, and violence, and it’s both wonderfully strange and so compelling.
(It’s also one of our July giveaways at 49thShelf! Canadian readers can enter to win a copy here!)
July 27, 2026
Meeting New People, by Daniel M. Lavery
For a while now, but especially since publishing my own Barbara Pym inspired comic novel, people have been telling me I should read Daniel M. Lavery’s fiction, which similarly captures the ordinary details of single women’s lives and casts them in a new light, and when I heard about his latest, Meeting New People, I couldn’t help myself. A novel about a nearly-60-year old woman called Barbara who’s just been dumped by another friend who’s has enough of her caustic attitude and judgey ways, and who among us isn’t a little Barbara, or at least fearing that we are?
I will say that this novel wasn’t fun to read exactly, and sometimes it was a bit of a slog. Not much happens at all, and we’re trapped in Barbara’s head, and Barbara is fairly insufferable, utterly convinced of her righteousness, and yet made vulnerable enough by her latest friend bust-up that she’s determined to do a few things differently, at least until she’s able to source some friend replacements. She seeks them out in her workplace, by cruising local churches, though not in her NYV apartment building, where she’s determined to avoid her obnoxious downstairs neighbour, Lorraine.
But I also found the story very compelling, and Barbara beautifully sympathetic without Lavery having to resort to sentiment. There’s a beautiful combination of sadness and strength at the heart of the novel, and a most delightful moral complexity. It was very much an Anita Brookner-meets-Barbara Pym kind of situation, quiet, funny, and profound, and I’m glad I read it.
