April 13, 2026
Cleo Dang Would Rather Be Dead, by Mai Nguyen
Mai Nguyen’s second novel, Cleo Dang Would Rather Be Dead, is a gift to anybody who’s ever thought, “I can’t imagine”—as well as an invitation to try. A comic novel about the aftermath of infant loss sounds impossible, I know, but also maybe it doesn’t—the absurdity of the situation is actually the perfect set-up, and this fiction born of the author’s own experience of loss and grief is so gorgeously heartfelt and human. And for those readers who don’t have to imagine, because they’ve been there, Cleo’s story is a powerful reminder that they’re not alone.
The story begins with the funeral, a tiny coffin, Cleo paralyzed by grief and amazed that she’s still expected to go through the ritual of a receiving line. Thankfully, her extrovert husband steps in, and Cleo retreats, establishing the dynamic they’ll be stuck in for months to come. To make matters even more complicated and terrible, Cleo’s best friend and neighbour, Paloma, has just given birth on the very same day as Cleo, except that she was able to bring her baby home, and is now going through the motions that the two friends had been expecting to experience together. And Cleo is unable to face up to any of it, overwhelmed by sadness at the loss of her daughter and the vision she’d had for what her life would be.
I’m taking part in a panel with Nguyen at Hamilton’s Grit Lit festival this weekend, which had me thinking about Cleo in connection with Clemence Lathbury, the protagonist of my recent novel, whose own loss and grief are considerably less heavy to hold than Cleo’s, but who similarly dares to blaze her own path through a period of transition, leading everyone who loves her to suspect that she’s gone totally insane. But like Clemence, Cleo stays the course, taking advice here and there, but locating her own compass through grief, grieving on her own timeline, taking on a most curious job to fill the hours in her day and the hole in her life—in Cleo’s case it’s a job as an assistant at a funeral home.
As sad as Cleo’s story is (in addition to being so very funny—in her loss, in her rage at her bad luck, the lady is pulling no punches), Cleo Dang Would Rather Be Dead absolutely overflows with love. Love for her daughter, love for Cleo herself from her husband, her parents, her friends. And love for life itself, eventually, even though for so very long the novel’s title rings true, and Cleo can’t think of a reason to go on, choosing to numb her emotions and consciousness with pills and booze, but a wise friend makes her realize that it doesn’t have to be this way. That the love and grief she carries for her daughter can be a reason to live, instead of why she doesn’t want to, and that a future is indeed possible.
Cleo Dang Would Rather Be Dead is a beautiful, poignant, funny, and life-affirming read.
April 12, 2026
A Week Away
We were in the north of England last week for a trip to visit family, and between the hours on a plane, lazy mornings, and bookshop visits, I read so many books!
The first read was The People of Privilege Hill, by Jane Gardam, which I’d stuck in my bag to read in case nothing at the airport struck my fancy, and when nothing at the airport struck my fancy, I was awfully glad to have it there. A short story collection is an awfully good idea for an overnight flight and fragmented attention, and while Gardam reads so strangely to me sometimes—the first book of hers I read was Old Filth, which was getting all the hype at the time, and I was disappointed to find it quite unfathomable—a commitment to appreciating and understanding her approach has proven most rewarding. It also helps to be able to read a short story twice or even three times to finally comprehend it. I finished the collection as our plane was touching down, which left me in a moment of panic—I needed to get to a bookshop pronto, and the W.H. Smith at airport arrivals only sells snacks and newspapers now.
Luckily we made it to Waterstones in Lancaster before the end of the day, and I was thrilled to find on the shelf two books I was coveting. The first of which was Tessa Hadley’s The Party. “What had happened… seemed to have two opposite faces, and she couldn’t choose between them. It was a humiliating drunken mistake full of risk, the very thing nice girls were warned against, which would shame her and ruin her forever. But it was also a revelation of lust, savage, and real, into which she must pass in order to become an adult, and sophisticated.” Hadley does not disappoint with this gorgeous novella, which has nothing slight about it. Rich and textured, with the most wonderful twist, a story of two sisters coming of age in postwar Bristol and the moment from which their futures begin to properly unfold. I loved it.
And then I got to read The Parallel Path, by Jen Ashworth. “I don’t know if there was some greater wisdom in my body that led me out onto the fells and over the rough ground the summer before, telling me I needed to learn how to walk, how to fall, how to manage when I lost my bearings, how to pick my body way slowly along uneven ground. I don’t know if my body – already knowing about the passenger in my skull – was seeking not a cure but a way to care for itself. But I’d like to think such things are possible.” While I’ve been visiting Lancashire on a regular basis for 23 years now, it is actually reading Ashworth’s books that has deepened my understanding of this place and of Northerness in general, her writing articulating so much I’ve always wondered about in connection with this culture I’ve married into (and in which the act of wondering at all is sometimes regarded as mildly suspect).
The Parallel Path is her memoir of her experience walking coast to coast across the north of England during the sweltering summer of 2023, a journey she was compelled to make in the wake of pandemic trauma and ongoing grief after the death of her former partner, her daughter’s father. Caregiving through all of this proves to be all-consuming and her coast to coast walk is meant to be a reclaiming of self, a rediscovery of untetheredness, and an exercise is self-sufficiency.
But Ashworth is never alone, not least because an ailing artist friend has resolved to send letters to each of her stops along the way, his thought provoking messages about death and dying tapped into the thoughts she is having along the way. And because those thoughts are rich and plentiful, delving into the past, the history of the places she encounters, into her own past, and also into her thoughts of her partner and children at home not so very far away.
Is she walking toward home or away from it? And similar paradoxes come into play as she considers life and death, sickness and health, solitude and connection , care and carelessness, and how between all of these is a kind of edgeplace that requires us to make friends with it if we want to live fully (if often uncomfortably) in the human experience.
Next up was The Portable Virgin, by Anne Enright, her fiction debut published in 1992, and which I purchased at the Oxfam Bookshop in Lancaster. My trips to the Oxfam Bookshop have become so unrewarding since I’ve apparently already acquired all the books I’ll ever want, and everything on the shelf is by Anita Shreve, but I was glad to find this one. Inscription reads: “14 September 1993/ Magic, I hope this marks the beginning for you. Congratulations – Women Studies here we come! With love, Annabel XXX.” Which in some ways is as inscrutable as these weird and disorienting stories that I mostly didn’t understand but still enjoyed. “Cathy was often wrong, she found it more interesting. She was wrong about the taste of bananas. She was wrong about the future of the Bob. She was wrong about where her life ended up. She loved corners, surprises, changes of light.”
I loved The Wildwater Women, recommended by the amazing Fred’s Bookshop (since 1956!) in Ambleside in the Lake District and even set in Ambleside among a group of women whose lives are transformed by wild swimming. Such a perfect vacation read and proper northern too—complete with mention of ginnels. ”Abby felt pride blaze across her chest. It was always easier to give advice than to take it, she knew that. But sometimes when your friends did amazing things – showed positivity and perseverance – some of that reflected back at you. Friendship was about knowing who was there for you when you got out of your depth – and she knew these women were. And as she swam in the water, melding with the landscape, she felt truly at peace with life in that moment.”
And oooh, I had a perfect read for my flight home from England. I LOVED The Shame Game, by LD Smithson, who I met by chance while browsing in The Grove Bookshop in Ilkley as her children conspicuously celebrated finding her bestselling book on the display table. So naturally I had to buy it, and I’m so glad I did. It’s the story of four old high school friends who each receive a message threatening to reveal their most shameful secret UNLESS they publicly reveal a shameful secret belonging to another member of their crew. Who among them will be willing to destroy a friend’s life to save their own? I cared about the characters so much, the story kept me guessing all the way through, and at a certain point became unputdownable, which is just what you want on an eight hour flight. I especially love that it was set it Ilkley. Such a wonderful souvenir.
My final vacation read was Sarah Hall’s Haweswater, which I also bought in Ilkley, but mostly read back in Canada, though it didn’t feel like it because her depiction of the Lake District was so evocative, and having been not too far from there, I could see it all so vividly in my mind. This is the debut by Hall, whose books have previously piqued by interest but seemed not quite for me. I started to read her latest, Helm, a novel that takes place over millennia and whose central character is a wind, but it wasn’t quite the right moment for me to get it. Now that I’ve read Haweswater, however, and enjoyed it so thoroughly, it gives me a better sense of her overall literary project and makes me think there’s a chance I can still find my way into it.
I picked up Haweswater because the true story and place it’s based on is mentioned in Jenn Ashworth’s memoir when she walks past the vividly blue Haweswater water reserve, and contemplates the villages that had once existed at the bottom of the lake when it was still a valley, before it was flooded during the 1930s in a massive project to bring drinking water to the people of Manchester. Hall is quite clear that her novel is a fiction, but the geography that inspires her story is so real—the water trickling through the fells, the blue slate of the so solid buildings of Mardale—cottages, the school, the church, and the pub. The narrative is unfathomably bleak—nothing ends well for anyone in this love story between the man from the Waterworks who arrives to tell the villagers about the project and the fierce young farmer’s daughter who is determined to oppose it. But oh, the prose is so vivid and alive, densely woven with meaning, and the bleakness takes a backseat, and it’s a pleasure to be enveloped in the story with all its various perspectives and unfathomable beauty and brutality at once. I am now firmly a Sarah Hall convert, and can’t wait to read more.
March 31, 2026
Inheritance, by Jane Park
Jane Park’s debut novel is the compelling story of a Korean immigrant family arriving in Alberta in the 1980s, how their Canadian dreams measure up to reality, and how the family’s history continues to influence their present, even as so much of the past remains unspoken. The story is narrated by the youngest daughter, Anne, who has a successful career as a lawyer in New York City, but returns to her mother and brother in Edmonton after her father dies. The story moves between the present day, as Anne takes stock of her job, her life, and her relationship, and her family’s past, including the difficult period where her parents struggled to eke out a living running a small town grocery store, a period that ended with a horrific act of violence that would shape the trajectory of everything that happens after that.
Some aspects of Jane’s character in the present day seem underdeveloped, although you could make a case for this being a result of everything that’s happened to her and her family rather than a literary problem. The weaving of the different time periods in among her story makes for rich and effective storytelling, however, and there is real nuance as Park considers different class and social dynamics within Korean communities, and within the small town community the family finds itself within as well, including members of a nearby Indigenous nation. Within each individual character too, there is a most human blend of light and dark, good and evil, and the notion of inheritance is considered from a variety of interesting angles, resulting in a read that’s rich and absorbing.
March 25, 2026
Will This Make You Happy, by Tanya Bush
With this book, I’ve finally succeeded in my goal of becoming a person who reads cookbooks cover to cover, although it helps that Tanya Bush’s Will This Make You Happy is as much narrative as recipe collection. The recipes themselves are just a little bit fussy (as opposed to no-fuss) in a way I find most appealing at the moment, having to go out of my way for an ingredient or two, realizing that the effort makes a difference, that it’s worth the reward. Like the malted milk power in the banana bread, which I’ve already made twice, once with the glaze, and once without, which just offers the most wonderful edge to the overall sweetness. I’m dying to try the recipe for blueberry jam corn muffin next, and don’t know where I can begin to source sweet corn powder, but I’m not giving up just yet. The point of the story, these recipes, is to venture out of one’s comfort zone, try something new, to indulge your appetites, see how much the world can hold.
Will This Make You Happy (intriguingly with no question mark) is organized by season, a collection of vignettes about the author’s life followed by a bunch of recipes loosely based on those mentioned in the narrative. When the book begins, Bush is 23, which for me was the year upon which everything hinged, and she’s stuck in a depressive malaise. Unemployed, too comfortable in her relationship, she longs for something more, and finds it on a whim when she bakes a cake to change to her mood. The first cake collapses, a veritable disaster, but she finds more success with banana bread, discovering the way forward in her tiny New York kitchen, and she begins to consider a future in baking.
The path ahead is not straightforward. She partakes in an internship of sorts in Italy, which proves to be a dispiriting time, rife with annoyances and disappointment. She wants she wants she wants, but getting doesn’t always make her happy, there is always something hard, there is always something more, and this continues to be the case when she ventures outside of her long-term relationship to pursue a crush on a woman she meets through a connection at her restaurant job. Her boyfriend is patient, but he has his limits too, and in love, and life, and eating, the question continues to be, What do I want? How much is enough? How will I know when I get there?
With gorgeous illustrations by Forsyth Harmon, Will This Make You Happy is a story about wandering and wondering in search of sweetness, listening to your heart, and discovering that settling isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
March 24, 2026
Never Been Better, by Leanne Toshiko Simpson
Finally, finally, I got my hands on Never Been Better, by Leanne Toshiko Simpson, a book that I’ve been really looking forward to since my friend Chantel Guertin awarded it the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Romance and couldn’t stop raving about it. I’ve become an admirer of Simpson’s advocacy for people living with mental health struggles and the way she shares her own experiences with bipolar, and so I’ve been looking forward to finding out how she considers these ideas via fiction in her debut novel, billed as My Best Friend’s Wedding, except the plot starts in the psych ward.
Our narrator is Dee, whose mental health troubles continue and whose life is held together by desperation, chewing gum, and the valiant efforts of her audacious sister Tilley—and I appreciate that in a novel about three psychiatric patients, the most deranged character of neither of these, but Tilley instead, who insists on joining Dee as the plus-one for her friends’ Matt and Misa’s destination wedding in Turks and Caikos, mostly because Dee’s intent on revealing her true feelings for Matt before the ceremony, and Tilley’s determined to save her sister from herself, whatever that entails (and also partake in the amentities of an all-inclusive)
It’s complicated, because Dee, Matt and Misa all met as psychiatric patients, but now that part of their story is written out as Misa presents a picture-perfect image of her relationship to her Japanese-Canadian family who have no idea that she lives with mental illness—they think she’s just an extra-dedicated hospital volunteer. That she cannot be honest about where her and Matt’s story began only underlines Dee’s certainty that Matt’s chosen the wrong person, and that breaking up the couple is the honourable thing to do.
What happens next is messy, twisty, human, and real, replete with hilarity (the line about Dee’s meds giving her the libido of a ham sandwich!) and also real heart. While I had my doubts, because this plot seems like it’s heading for a shipwreck, the resolution is rich and meaningful, a meditation on ever after (in mental sickness and mental health) and what being “better” really means.
March 23, 2026
Nowhere, by Jon Claytor
The monsters are real in Nowhere, the debut graphic novel by Jon Claytor, a book I’ve been looking forward to because I’ve enjoyed Claytor’s comics on Instagram and because it’s edited by Bethany Gibson, who’s one of my favourite Canadian editors. But then it turns out the cube in Nowhere is real as well, as in actually real, nonfictional, a giant white box outside Sackville, NB, that is (according to my web searches)…a facility for storing cranberries? Although that’s a part of the story I choose not to think about too deeply, instead considering all the other ways that Nowhere most intriguingly blurs the line between impossible and otherwise, its uncanniness and familiarity. It’s the story of 12 year old Joel whose deadbeat stepdad’s car runs out of steam in small town that seems nondescript save for the aforementioned cube (I don’t believe in cranberries) and oh yes, the gangs of marauding wolves and clowns and zombies who walk the streets at night, and ordinary citizens who keep disappearing.
Nowhere is a monstrous tale of growing up in an unstable world where anything is possible in the worst way and everything else is precarious and uncertain. It’s a story of becoming and unbecoming, of loneliness and desperation, probing the eerie edges of reality, adolescence, and inexplicability. Weird and twisted, it’s quietly absorbing in the very best way.
March 19, 2026
The Republic of Love
“Work is important. Living arrangements are important. Wars and good sex and race relations and the environment are important, and so are health and illness. Even minor shifts of faith or political intention are given a weight that is not accorded to love. We turn our heads and pretend it’s not there, the thunderous passions that enter that enter a life and alter its course. Love belongs in an amateur operetta, on the inside of a jokey greeting card, or in the annals of an old-fashioned poetry society. Moon and June and spoon and soon. September and remember. Lord Byron, Edna St. Vincent Millay. It’s womanish, it’s embarrassing, something to jeer at, something for jerks. Just a love story, people say about a book they happen to be reading, or caught reading. They smirk or roll their eyes at the mention of love.” —Carol Shields, The Republic of Love
The question of what to read while launching a book, for me, is a vital one with the highest stakes, and the answer is never straightforward. I don’t want anything too challenging, or too flawed, or too difficult to consider while my mood is all over the place. The book can’t be unputdownable, because I’ll be busy and distracted, putting it down over and over again—more important that it be pick-up-able again. There needs to be some comfort inherent. The tone has to be pitch-perfect, hitting just right, or I’ll be unable to tolerate it. I remember reading Lianne Moriarty’s Big Little Lies when my first novel came out, and it was the perfect companion, especially since it was a mass market paperback (I bought it at the drug store) and it fit so easily into my purse.
The last two books I read before I finally picked up this one were abandoned within their first hundred pages. Possibly the problem was me, and I just wasn’t in the proper head space to appreciate them, but it was a problem regardless, and I required a sure thing. And so I picked up Carol Shields’ novel The Republic of Love, a novel I’ve read several times, but an edition that I’ve never read before, a first edition hardcover I bought at Bay Used Books in Sudbury when I was in town years ago for the Wordstock Literary Festival, the very same edition that my main character Clemence picks up on her first visit to Crampton’s Used Bookshop in one of the early chapters of Definitely Thriving.
When I was a teenager, Carol Shields blew my mind wide open to what a novel could hold and what a novel could do with her celebrated The Stone Diaries. And in some ways I regret the way that book’s massive acclaim would overshadow her earlier work, which to be always seemed like an afterthought. Because rereading her novels over the last year and a bit has underlined just how intricate and fascinating her fiction had always been, and that all her books were part of a wider project of trying to get to the bottom of the unfathomableness of other people and the (im)possibilty of ever really understanding one another.
Shields was so curious and open-hearted about the world that her fiction today reads as fresh and clever as the day her books were published. It certainly helps that most of us are as baffled by the mysteries of other people as we ever were—so the questions she was grappling with are as urgent as they ever were. It was interesting to be reading this novel about love and the nature of romance (and about how unseriously love and romance are taken in our society) as I’ve been releasing my own book that is categorized as romance (a most fraught endeavour! People are so rude about romance, as the passage I’ve quoted above makes clear, but also people who love romance have very specific ideas about what romance is and isn’t). I adore that Carol Shields knew that a novel about romance was important, in case anyone needed reminding.
I was amazed to be reading The Republic of Love, and realizing just how much it reminder me of Katherine Heiny’s 2022 novel Early Morning Riser, both books about modern love, about love in a small city, about what it means when there’s a high chance of you running into your spouse’s ex’s husband when you’re out purchasing groceries. Both books are about the infinite ways that we’re bound to each other, and the unbearable beauty of so much humanity, how sometimes it’s too much, impossible to hold. Both books rendered with incredible specificity—how both portray the minutiae of work and home decor, family ties, friendship, celebration, tragedy, mundanity, and all the rest.
The Republic of Love is such a good book, such a strange and wonderful book. It’s about the romance between a couple who don’t even meet until halfway through the narrative. It’s about these two people but also about an entire city, gorgeously and hilariously polyphonic. It’s about a man who begins his life with twenty-seven mothers, domesticity on steroids. Oh, it’s over the top, in the very best way (and also a love letter to Winnipeg!).
“Love, love, love, how can we possibly speak of love in the last decade of the twentieth century, a century that is, in any case, in tatters?”
March 12, 2026
The Beginning Comes After the End, by Rebecca Solnit
“All those predecessors, one way or another, participated in making the world we inhabit, the one we arrived in that already had language and stories, temples, and bridges and libraries, the one that also had human impact as mountains of garbage and garbage on mountains all the way to the top of Everest and pollution and destruction and extinction. It also had songs and dreams and societies for the protection of this river and those children. And for the protection of California condors, which almost went extinct by the 1980s, when they were only 27 left on earth. They were, through extraordinary dedication and expertise, brought back from the brink, bred entirely and then partially in captivity, the new members of the species released into the wild, so that as of 2026, there are now almost 600, some of them only recently returned to the Klamath basin of northernmost California, where they now sore over rematriated Native land on wings that span 3 metres.” —Rebecca Solnit
I loved this book, the latest in Solnit’s series of small and powerful books for Haymarket Press, which I especially enjoyed for its cohesiveness, the way it renders the chaos of our current moment as something that might be laying the path for better things ahead. I so admire and appreciate Solnit’s vision and perspective, how her experience in decades of environmental activism offers texture to our understanding of right now. We don’t know what’s ahead, but there is so much possibility.
March 10, 2026
The Secret Diary of Mona Hasan, by Salma Hussain
As an Adrian Mole superfan who turned 12 in 1991, I was on familiar ground with Salma Hussain’s debut middle grade novel, The Secret Diary of Mona Hasan—a year in the life of a girl growing up in Dubai who spends the summer with her grandparents and cousins in her parents’ native Pakistan before her family emigrates to Canada, a book we got free with our cereal from Kelloggs’ Feeding Reading promotion—which my daughter read and loved before I did. Although the book she read and loved was not the same one that I experienced, the central charm of Hussain’s novel for an adult reader being the gap between the story Mona is telling and what’s actually going on around her. (Mona and her sister decide to name their new baby brother Osama, after the Urdu and Arabic word for lion. “Oh, Allah, what a bright future awaits him with such an auspicious name!”). As with Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole books, which Mona references here as among of her own favourites (“it’s about a thirteen-year-old boy growing up in a part of England called the “East Midlands,” which sounds a lot like the ‘Middle East,’ doesn’t it…”), a precocious young person has no idea what they don’t know, readers of their own age taking much of the narrative at face value, and still finding much to appreciate (this novel is a bit Are You There, Allah? It’s Me, Mona).
There’s a lot going on in Mona’s diary as her year kicks off—a creepy uncle who’s a little too handsy; the first Gulf War, which doesn’t even occasion a school closure (Mona is proud of herself for remembering from TV that only 383 Americans are killed in the ground offensive. Her sister asks how many Iraqis died: “Don’t be ridiculous, Tutoo. No one on TV keeps a count of dead Iraqi bodies.”); Mona’s mother’s nascent feminism; a change to the gym program requiring actual sports; and then an infatuation with Waleed, a boy who inspires poetry of the same calibre that Adrian Mole used to write for Pandora Braithwaite. Once the family arrives in Canada, a country that fails to live up many of its promises for Mona’s parents, Mona continues to do her best to stay brave and hopeful, clearly the hero of her life in her own mind—and by the end of the novel, her reader is also fully on board.
March 9, 2026
Telephone, by Percival Everett
I’ve been wanting to read more by Percival Everett since reading Maris Kreizman’s note that “as his major publisher debut, James feels so falsely profound that I have to wonder if Everett is fucking with us. I wouldn’t put it past him and I’d respect him all the more…” Having seen American Fiction, the film based on Everett’s novel Erasure, I don’t think such a idea would be so shocking. And so I finally picked up Telephone, published in 2020, famously published in three different versions, with subtle variations, just to underline that no two people are ever really reading the same book anyway, and underlining the novel’s considerations and questions about actions and outcomes, truth and consequences.
Telephone is about a geologist/paleobiologist who digs deep in his job, but leaves depths unplumbed in his personal and emotional life, which makes things extra strained and complicated when his twelve-year-old daughter is diagnosed with a debilitating neurological disease that has no cure or treatment. Meanwhile he’s negotiating fraught dynamics with women in his workplace, and preoccupied with written cries for help appearing on scraps of paper tucked into the pockets of used clothing he’s buying from an online seller. Is there anybody he can save?
The narrator’s reserve means that this novel about a man witnessing his child’s terminal decline is nearly bearable, but also means that the reader needs to reach far to understanding what might be going on being this story’s surface of reticence, such spareness. Nothing is quite what it seems in this novel, underlining Maris Kreizman’s thesis. It’s true that to read fiction at all is to open oneself up to be fucked with, but it seems like Percival Everett might have a knack for making this into an art form.
