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.
July 24, 2026
Cottage Reading Recap
We were the luckiest people in the whole wide world when we ran away to rural Quebec for a week, returning to Toronto only just as the toxic smoke-filled skies were clean and blue again. I have never been more in need of a break, and the relaxation was epic, just so much sleeping, swimming, and reading (and eating! Quebec is delicious…).
My first book was Author Weekend, by Laura Zigman, a comic thrilled about an aging bestseller who will resort to anything to continue in the world of publishing (and I mean anything). It is perhaps a bit too inside baseball for the average reader, but I’m certainly part of the niche group this novel is designed to appeal to. And after a start that slow to get going, it did. It would be better if this novel skewering the reality of the publishing world and what an author has to resort to in order to make it was a stronger book—this one was trying to do too much at once. But it came together in the end and I really enjoyed it (but not as much as Zigman’s Small World, which I loved).
Next was Summer Reading, by Hilma Wolitzer, a used bookstore find I’ve been saving since the winter. I read Wolitzer’s 1980 novel Hearts last year and it was so incredible that now I want to read everything else by her. Summer Reading is the story of three women whose very different social circles overlap during one summer in the Hamptons—a wealthy wife who’s hoping a book club will help to fill part of the void in her life, the young woman from town who works for her during the summer, and the retired academic who’s eking out a living running wealthy women’s book clubs. By the end of the summer, all of these women’s lives will be changed. It was great, and I adored it.
I found Mary H.K. Choi’s Pool House less absorbing, its characters and their story at a remove, but part of that was by design, I think. Set in Los Angeles about a Korean-American actress who’s gone broke so she and her daughter are living in their pool house, the main house rented out to short-term tenants, the daughter working a local fast food joint with the dream of a promotion to management and getting to move away from her mother. When mother’s longtime lover and sitcom husband dies, the actor who played her TV comes to town, and the three of them perform their familial bonds in awkward, earnest, and dysfunctional ways. If I was younger and cooler, I’d likely like this book better, but it’s ending absolutely gets 5 stars from me.
Next up, still on the west coast, Tiffany Crum’s This Story Might Save Your Life, about Benny and Joy, two best friends who run a survival-themed podcast together, and then Joy and her husband suddenly disappear and Benny is left behind to piece together what has happened. Fun and breezy, with Arthur Fonzarelli allusions, I wouldn’t call this deftly plotted, exactly, but I liked reading it a lot.
Back to the east coast now, Nag’s Head, North Carolina. I found Eva Gates’ Death By Beach Read in a Little Free Library en-route to our vacation, and thought it would fit well into my vacation stack. Gates, who writes also under the name Vicki Delany, has written more than 20 cozy mystery novels with bookish themes, and while I wish the bookishness had factored into this one a bit more (there is a book group reading The House of Seven Gables, but not much is made of it) and it was pretty cookie cutter, it was still a good time. Lighthouse Librarian Lucy has moved into her new home with her fiance who is working hard to bring the dilapidated building into good condition, but the effort is set back when Lucy discovers a body in the kitchen and it turns out solving the mystery involves figuring out the true story of a reported haunting in that same house decades before.
I read Jenny Jackson’s The Shampoo Effect after that, set in a fictionalized Ipswich, Massachusetts, when the author is from (and which found its place on the literary map when John Updike moved to town in the 1960s). I liked Jackson’s debut novel, but I loved this follow-up, which manages to be frothy and smart at the very same time, inspired by Updike, perhaps. When a writer comes to town for the summer, she falls in love and becomes connected to her partner’s very tight group of friends (including the on-again-off-again girlfriend who is pregnant with his child). The points of view move between the writer, and three of the women in the friend-group, all of whom are coming secrets. Everything comes to an explosive climax that is resolved in the most perfect, and surprising way imaginable.
Sue Miller’s The Arsonist after that, set in New Hampshire, which barely has a seaside, and this novel is set in a different region altogether, but there are still conflicts between local people and summer people and lakes and ponds for swimming. When Frankie returns from 15 years working in east Africa to the New Hampshire village where her family has always spent their summers, tensions are especially high with an arsonist setting fires to people’s summer homes, the fires getting riskier and more dangerous all the time. Frankie begins an affair with the editor of the local newspaper, grapples with her father’s increasingly obvious dementia, and considers notions of home and belonging. I absolutely HATED this novel because it’s the last time I will ever read a novel by Sue Miller again (until she publishes something new—fingers crossed!). Which is to say that I didn’t hate this novel at all, in fact I love it, and Sue Miller’s books are just so incredibly excellent, a fact that gets undermined by how much they’re also such a pleasure.
And I read those last two novels so quickly that I had time to read one more! Dolly All The Time was the first Annabel Monaghan book I’ve ever read, and I loved it so much. Partly because its romantic lead was called Stewart—there aren’t enough romantic leads called Stewart/Stuart, and Stewart/Stuarts are some of my favourite people in the world. This fake dating story has oh so much heart, and more townie/outside tension, except Stewart Whitfield is not an outsider, exactly. The town of Whitfield (fictional, located next door to Newburyport, MA) is named after him, but he’s not of the place in the way that Dolly Brick is, Dolly who manages multiple gigs, raises her 12 year old son, and has come back to town for the summer to help her father run his fish store. When Stewart and Dolly team up to pose as a couple, he’s hoping to appear emotionally balanced enough to be made CEO of the family company, and Dolly’s looking to finance her father’s new roof, and both of them end with far more than they bargained for, namely LOVE. So funny, so clever, and so fresh, I was thrilled to fall head over heels with this one.
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.
