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.
March 4, 2026
Endling, by Maria Reva
I was going to write something about how I was a co-juror for the 2022 Kobzar Book Award, a prize for Ukrainian-Canadian literature, and vividly recall how much more viscerally I felt the Russian invasion of Ukraine that February for having been just steeped in stories of Holodomor and less abjectly genocidal elements of Soviet Ukrainian life as per Maria Reva’s first book, Good Citizens Need Not Fear, which would take the top prize. I remember how the ceremony had to be moved online due to ongoing pandemic reasons, and how shattered the award’s organizers from the Ukrainian-Canadian community were by what was happening in the country whose culture we were celebrating, how the whole thing was devastating and just so profoundly tragic and sad. (And four years later, Ukraine still fights. Having been steeped in those stories, I’m not surprised by this either, just heartbroken.)
But then what does it mean to consider experiencing a war from worlds away? Do any feelings, however visceral, matter at such a distance? What it means to have a thousands of tanks roll into a sovereign nation and interrupt your plans, if your plans happen to be an awards ceremony in Edmonton? Or a novel you’re writing in Vancouver, in case of Reva herself, or at least her proxy in the novel Endling, which is just a wild and wonderful experience and an experiment in what a novel might possibly contain.
Endling is about a snail scientist in Ukraine who funds her mobile lab by working as a potential bride for international suitors who arrive in the country on romance tours, though she has no interest in romance herself. This work brings her into a contact with a pair of sisters who are hatching a plan to kidnap a bunch of the bachelors as part of a campaign to attract attention from their long lost activist mother, and they pull it off just as the Russians are invading Ukraine, turning the country into a war zone. And here the novel veers into a wild meta-narrative of the author’s own fiction being disturbed by war in the very place she’s writing about, this narrative weaving in and out of the broader story in an unsettling and fascinating way.
What is fiction? What can fiction do? What does it mean to suppose we can control any narrative at all?
Endling unsettles in the very best way.
March 2, 2026
Brawler, by Lauren Groff
Nearly 20 years later, I still remember what it felt like to be reading Lauren Groff for the first time, her debut novel The Monsters of Templeton, a book that could have been a one-off, clever, a gimmick. And then a year later I’d read her story collection Delicate Edible Birds and realize that Lauren Groff can do ANYTHING (and also she writes swimlit!). These were delicate, edible and sometimes absolutely brutal stories that veered off on all directions, the same way Groff has continued to do throughout her career with her novels, to the point where I’m not always interested in all of her projects (which is fine—a writer should pursue her own fascinations) and her latest release, the short story collection Brawler, only underlines her narrative power, precision and excellence.
Lauren Groff’s novels are sweeping—Arcadia and Fates and Furies!—and her short fiction manages to be just the same, every little little story an epic, some of these unfolding over years and decades. Usually long short stories are not my favourite, but I never wanted any of the stories in Brawler to end, only getting through it when they did because the endings are so exquisite and worthy of the head-exploding emoji.
Each story hinges on a moment of unfathomable consequence. “Wind,” the first, takes place in the 1950s as a woman attempts to flee her husband’s violence, the story narrated by her eldest child; in “To Sunland,” a young woman makes a choice when she become responsible for her disabled brother; in “Brawler,” a high school diver with bloody knuckles reckons with her mother’s illness; “Birdie” probes the dark edges of female friendship; “What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf?” is a masterpiece that takes a rich kid from the idyll of childhood to the darkest night of the soul (and the ending!! omg); “Under the Wave” explores the aftermath of a climate-change driven natural disaster; “Such Small Islands” is about a little girl not quite aware of her own power (or is she?); and “Annunication” about a young woman’s reckless choices whose consequences come for others.
If you want to be devastated over and over again (what else is reading for?), then Brawler is the book for you. One of the sharpest, and most haunting works I’ve encountered in a long time.
February 27, 2026
Why We Read, by Shannon Reed
I do not entirely regret to inform you that being obsessed with Pittsburgh has become my entire personality, and Shannon Reed’s collection Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries, and Just One More Page Before Lights Out was the perfect Pittsburgh souvenir to bring home from my whirlwind trip for the American Booksellers’ Association Winter Institute. And not just because there’s an essay in the collection entitled “The Five People You Meet When You Work in a Bookstore” that’s dedicated to the very bookseller who sold me the book. (Is the sixth person you meet when you work in a bookstore a Canadian author who’s hiked across the city to see your beautiful bookshop and is a little bit too excited about having walked over a bridge? It turns out that nobody in Pittsburgh gets excited about crossing bridges! Unbelievable that bridge crossing ever gets old…)
I started reading Why We Read on my flight home, and finished it this morning, about 26 hours later, and I loved the journey from start to finish, in which Reed—a Professor at the University of Pittsburgh—takes the reader through her life in books and reading. She writes about growing up in books and libraries, and the safety and comfort she found in reading as a hearing impaired person. The essays are familiar, warm, and loosely chronological, personal but also with touches that will be universal to anyone who’s ever been compelled to pick up a book about books. (It’s me!) In between the essays are humour pieces with titles like “Signs Your May Be a Female Character in a Work of Historical Fiction” (“Your name is Sarah.”) or “Signs You May Be An Adult Character in a YA Novel” (“You are dead.”).
A childhood pilgrimage to see the hole in the ground where the Ingalls family lived in On the Banks of Plum Creek, the saga of trying to get her preschool students to stop selecting a picture book version of “Old MacDonald” at story time, introducing her public school students to libraries, being assigned to teach a university course on vampires even though she’s terrified of vampires, adding George Saunders Lincoln in the Bardo to her course syllabus and only after sitting down to read and realizing she didn’t understand the novel (!). How she skimmed for the Pizza Hut BOOK IT! program and maybe missed the point (but got the personal pan pizza. She writes about how reading requires us to be vulnerable, to be okay with not always understanding or knowing, with being wrong sometimes. About pretentious English Major guys whose favourite novels are Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Moby Dick…
Wise, kind, funny, intimate, and surprising, reading these essays feels like meeting a friend.
