September 8, 2025
Taking Stock for September
Making: plans to get the word out about and celebrate my new novel, DEFINITELY THRIVING
Getting: cozy in my cardigan. Summer is not hanging around this year!
Cooking: Nothing at the moment, but Smitten Kitchen’s pasta salad with roasted carrots and tops is on the menu for the tonight!
Sipping: Tea sweetened with honey, because there was just the littlest bit left in the jar. I learned this trick from Jen Knoch—pour tea into the jar to get the dregs. Preventing food waste is delicious.
Reading: Ripeness, by Sarah Moss. I just started it this morning so am still just on the opening pages.
Waiting: for tonight, like Jennifer Lopez, but also differently, because I’m going to see Miriam Toews at the Toronto Reference Library.
Looking: At the trees outside my kitchen window which are suddenly turning autumnal (and I don’t hate it).
Listening: The sound of kids on the street outside. And someone operating a power saw. There is a bylaw in my neighbourhood that someone must always be operating a power saw or a leaf blower. If this wasn’t happening, we might all die.
Wishing: That everybody everywhere could find a little bit of peace in their hearts.
Enjoying: That my youngest child now makes her own way to school. I thought it would be hard to lose the framework of school walks, but it’s freed up so much time.
Appreciating: That both my children are happy at school.
Eating: Ripe pears. So good.
Liking: My new jeans, which are the first high waist jeans I’ve ever had? And they’re so comfortable and look great.
Loving: The sunshine on my garden.
Buying: Or ATTEMPTING to buy warm pjs for my kids at the new LL Bean. We’re going camping this weekend and neither of them have suitable sleepwear. Wish me luck.
Managing: the epic task of making sure all the produce gets eaten during the most delicious season in Ontario. This requires washing all the fruit, keeping fruit bowls filled, making sure the basket of grapes does not get lost in the back of the fridge, yelling at everybody to EAT THE STONE FRUIT. It’s a full time job. I’m not sorry.
Watching: I went to the movies on Friday and saw The Roses and loved it so much.
Hoping: that Lake Ontario is not too cold this weekend and I can ENJOY a swim (which is different than having a swim and not enjoying it, but I’ll take that too…)
Wearing: I’ve told you already, but my new jeans and a cardigan (and I do so delight in how the world is so Taylor Swift Folklore now and “August” turns to “Cardigan” as the month ticks over…)
Following: Fix the News! It’s the best. Read about the decline of mother to child HIV transmission in Botswana since 2000. It will blow your mind!
Noticing: That not enough people marvelling at decline of mother to child HIV transmission in Botswana. Guys. Get on it.
Sorting: Oh gosh, not enough. Sock and underwear drawer desperately needs it.
Coveting: New Taylor Swift album! And Olivia Colman’s wardrobe in The Roses
Feeling: Pretty good!
Hearing: Thumps through the wall from the house mine is semi-detached to. None of us are alone in the world.
September 8, 2025
Preorder Rewards
Thanks to everyone who helped celebrate the cover reveal for my novel DEFINITELY THRIVING, coming to Canadian and US readers from House of Anansi on March 17, 2026.
We have created the most adorable reward for everyone who places a preorder… (Preordering=heading to your favourite bookselling place—online or IRL—and ordering the book in advance of publication.)
If you preorder today, you’ll be securing something lovely for future-you(the novel itself!), but I will sweeten the deal for you-right-now with these adorable DEFINITELY THRIVING stickers (based on @melanielambrick’s cover illustrations) to express my thanks for your support.
Preorder DEFINITELY THRIVING wherever books are sold, and then email me a proof of purchase AND your mailing address to klclare AT gmail DOT com, and I will pop these beauties into the post for you. Those books! That cat! That declaration, ironic or otherwise, that you are DEFINITELY THRIVING. You know you want it…
About DEFINITELY THRIVING: The heartening and hilarious story of a woman who doesn’t have it all figured out just yet.
After accidentally-on-purpose exploding her listless marriage by being discovered in bed with the next-door neighbours, Clemence Lathbury returns to her hometown resolved to build a life for herself that is good and substantial, to become the kind of sensible woman who won’t be distracted by frippery and romance. It’s supposed to be Eat, Pray, Love, without the love part. But no woman is an island, and soon Clemence finds herself embroiled in neighbourhood drama; beginning a crusade at the local bookshop; becoming adopted by a well-groomed, one-eyed cat; and being forced to admit her attraction to two very different men—each a romantic lead in his own right. But how to choose? And never mind the complications of her quirky family …
A novel about friendship, community, and church jumble sales, Definitely Thriving is a celebration of people who are perfectly imperfect, and all the love and support that’s required for one woman to make it on her own.
*Thanks to @stuart.lawler for sticker design!
September 5, 2025
Rufous and Calliope, by Sarah Louise Butler
When I reviewed Sarah Louise Butler’s beautiful debut novel The Wild Heavens—about a quest to prove the existence of the Sasquatch—in 2020, I wrote, “it’s less about the finding than the searching, about the wonder instead of answers, about the stories we tell about the mysteries both of ourselves and of the world.” Her new novel, Rufous and Calliope, seems like a different kind of story on the surface, not a mythical creature in sight, but it similarly blurs the lines between fact and fiction, fancy and reality, and is wholly under the spell of its vivid natural setting deep in the rugged British Columbia interior.
The novel begins with Rufous, in his forties, suffering from a degenerative neurological disorder. His hold on the present is tenuous, and he’s had to give up driving, leave his job as a cartographer, and the novel finds him on an epic quest across the landscape to return to the treehouse where he and older his siblings made a home for themselves for a season when he was five years old, after the death of their grandmother. And as Rufous walks, the narrative moves back those enchanted days when he and his siblings were ever skirting the authorities who would have brought them into the child welfare system, but he felt cared for, and everything was infused with a magical sense of freedom. But the season came to an end through circumstances that are not delineated until the end of the story, Rufuous’s siblings leaving him the care of a lesbian couple in a small town who run a cafe, and he grows up loved and cared for, but the loss of his siblings wears heavy on his soul and is as conspicuous as the missing little finger on his hand.
What was the cataclysmic event that tore the family apartment? Whatever happened to Rufuous’s twin sister, Calliope? And what’s really going on with Rufous in the present as he makes his way along the route back to the treehouse? Is he actually going to find his siblings there, or is this just another of his delusions and hallucinations, manifestations of the crumbling in his mind? His decline mirrored in the ecological devastation all around him, the wildfire smoke particles he breathes in all along the journey.
Does this sound bleak? Its not, not really. There are harsh truths that are central to the story—death, and loss, and heartache. But these are balanced out by other things that are just as true, examples of care, friendship, extraordinary survival, wonder at the nature and the mysteries of the universe. What an incredible book.
September 3, 2025
Snap, by Susin Nielsen
A picture book I really love is AUTHOR’S DAY, by Daniel Pinkwater, which is perhaps truest to the experience of being a writer in public as anything I’ve ever read, the story of a children’s book writer who shows up to a school visit and is met with one abject humiliation after another, to the obliviousness of school staff, and it’s an experience like that—no doubt somewhat universal—is the catalyst for SNAP, the first novel for adults from celebrated and award-winning author Susin Nielsen.
Frances Partridge is smack-dab in the worst year of her life: her children are grown, prickly and difficult; she feels like she’s losing her mother to dementia; and her husband has left her, out of the blue, after 25 years of what she’d always believed as a happy marriage. And so when an adolescent boy starts harassing her during a school visit where she’s reading from her beloved middle grade series, Phoebe Unknown, Frances—on her last nerve—is not having any of it, and tells him what she really thinks…while his classmate is filming the whole episode, the video going viral within hours, and soon Frances has being dumped by her publisher and charged with assault on a minor among the series of disasters that have befallen her lately.
SNAP is the story of what happens next, when Frances is sentenced to community service and an anger-management class during which she finds an unexpected connection to two of her classmates, and after some frustration and much humour, their lives become transformed. It’s a hilarious and heartwarming story of justice and vengeance (and very annoying lapses in swimming pool etiquette), and I loved it through and through.
September 1, 2025
This Summer…
This summer was just the best. I was blessed with so many swims, good friends, great reads, fun road trips, fresh peaches, antihistamines, long days, cool nights, swift bike rides, plays, movies, even a baseball game (what?), gorgeous blooms in my garden, and corn for sale by the side of the highway. This summer was a work of art, and I’m a little bit proud of it, because I planned/booked everything back of January/February, when such a thing as summer was hard to believe in, and now it’s just in the rear-view, and oh, I loved it all. And now? Ready for the August-to-Cardigan transition…
August 25, 2025
More Summer Reading
If someone wrote a book about MY summer, it would be awfully boring to read about—all glory, no drama—but oh how lovely it’s been to experience. Last week we spent another beautiful holiday lakeside, and there was so much time for everything—being a little bit bored, even. We watched a movie every day and one day even watched two (Jaws and Puss in Boots—an incongruous mix but the latter was a nice palate cleanser). And of course, there was reading.
I started off with THE HOMEMADE GOD, which is the first book I’ve ever read by Rachel Joyce, and while it didn’t blow my mind, I enjoyed it, and the depiction of the lake in particular (and swimming) made this a very good book with which to kick off my holiday, even though my lake was in Haliburton instead of Italy. It’s the story of four adult siblings from London whose lives have been defined by their father, a middle-brow but very famous artist, and how their messy arrangements and understandings are turned upside down when he marries an enigmatic woman in her 20s, and then winds up dead at his Italian villa not long after, and his purported final painting is nowhere to be found.
Next, I read THE UPSTAIRS HOUSE, by Julia Fine, which came into my life in the most beautiful way. I happened to be in a bookshop a few weeks ago and picked up this book for absolutely no reason at all, and ITS PREMISE WAS A POSTPARTUM WOMAN WHOSE HOUSE IS HAUNTED BY THE GHOST OF MARGARET WISE BROWN. I mean, WHAT?? Could there BE a more perfect premise for a book? And how did I never hear about it, and can you imagine if I’d never picked up that book at all and shared a timeline with a novel about a postpartum woman whose house is haunted by the ghost of Margaret Wise Brown and never ever read it? I cannot imagine a greater tragedy. Even better, the book was WONDERFUL, dark and literary, about an academic whose thesis on Margaret Wise Brown and her influence by modernists like Gertrude Stein is put on hold by the birth of her first child, and things get weird after that, the novel itself haunted by Good Night Moon (itself a ghost story, if you read carefully) and The Runaway Bunny, and like any good writer herself influenced by Margaret Wise Brown, Fine resists an ending that doesn’t unsettle somewhat. This book was terrific.
And then I picked up REAL TIGERS, by Mick Herron, the third novel in his Slow Horses series, which I’m really enjoying (and it’s been reported to me by reputable sources that the TV show is even better than the book!). The series subverts spy tropes (among many tropes) and is so interesting for that, though sometimes the narrative gets very in the weeds and I’m a bit lost, which doesn’t bother me so very much (this is the case for me and any spy or mystery novel, to be honest). Anyway, I’m a fan and will keep reading—though my husband is two books ahead of me and maybe read too many at once, and suggests I space them out a bit, because it’s possible to have too much of a good thing.
And then GOD HELP THE CHILD, by Toni Morrison, which kind of cemented the theme of moral ambiguity in my reading list, as all of Morrison’s works do, blurring firm lines adhered to by people who are too fond of certainty. It’s the story of Bride, born to a mother who is shocked by the blackness in the hue of her skin, and brings her up with emotional deprivation to train her for a world that is going to be hard on her, another novel that subverts the readers understanding of good and evil (that last line! Absolutely haunting…) and maybe this is the first time a reviewer has compared Toni Morrison with the Slow Horses books, but both are utterly uninterested in making their readers comfortable or confirming anything.
And then I read MS. DEMEANOR, by Elinor Lipman, whom I’ve never read before, but I found this one in a booksale earlier this year and have been saving it for a holiday. Unlike THE UPSTAIRS HOUSE, this is a not a novel whose central appeal lies in its premise, if only because the narrative is all over the place (which is kind of ironic for a story about house arrest). It’s about a woman who gets caught having sex with a junior colleague on the rooftop deck of her Manhattan apartment, subsequently losing her job and being sentenced to six months of house arrest, but it’s also about love, Polish aristocrats, 19th century cookbooks, twins and sisterhood, and the possibilities for redemption. I devoured it, and it reminded me of Laurie Colwin, which is the highest literary praise I know how to deliver.
Next up was THE BOARDING HOUSE, by William Trevor, whose novels have been a summer staple of mine ever since I bought a used copy of his 1971 novel MISS GOMEZ AND THE BRETHREN for 10 cents in the Presquille Provincial Park park store. His works are so wicked and irreverent, his earlier books in particular, a bit of a Muriel Spark presence of the devil sensibility (Toni Morrison would concur). This 1965 novel was his third book, the story of a ragtag group of tenants in a London boarding house whose plans go awry when the owner of the house suddenly dies and his will leaves two very incompatible tenants in charge of everything—a surefire recipe for chaos, which transpires. My one reservation about this book was the single character of colour, a Nigerian man called Mr. Obd, who is not gifted the same complexity as his fellow characters, who is rendered simple and childlike (and his physical features drawn in racist terms). It made me think a lot because ALL the characters in this book were hideously flawed, so in a way Trevor’s portrayal is a kind of equality, but Obd doesn’t get to be human in the same way, is a collection of cliches (and also the novel’s ending doesn’t serve him). This is not a reason to not read this book, which is such a wickedly good one, but it’s definitely grounds for thoughtful critique (and this is a problem I find it almost any British novel from its time which acknowledged that Black people even existed).
And then the sweet treat of a book by Mhairi McFarlane, who is one of my favourite romance novelists, her books having a wonderful complexity and depth of character. Between Us was published in 2023, the story of a school teacher whose writer boyfriend’s TV series has been enormously successful, and she wonders if this is part of the reason why their relationship feels stale, or if it would have happened anyway after a decade together. And then she watches the pilot of his new show and discovers painful details from her personal life have been included in the story, and other details make her wonder if she really ever knew him at all—but also a break-up would destroy their longtime friend group and she might be left with nothing. All of which is complicated when she’s called back to her hometown to help out in her mother’s pub, stirring up the same memories provoked by what she’d seen in the show, and making her face things she’s been hiding from since her childhood.
Followed by WE ARE LIGHT, by Gerda Blees, which I bought on impulse at a bookshop in Bancroft while we were away, and it’s a fascinating book, translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison, based on a true story about a commune whose members attempt to live on light and air, foregoing food, which leads to one member’s death, which is where the book begins, and the narrative uses the language of the commune of collectivity and oneness to tell a story where each chapter begins with “We are ——”, beginning with “We are night” and concluding with “We are light,” the story told from that precise point of view (which includes that of a pen, a pair of socks, the scent of oranges, the neighbours, the dead woman’s family, the detective investigating whose own daughter is suffering with anorexia which gives her work a personal edge). There is a whimsical element to the approach, but the care and precision of the perspective means there is nothing “light” about it. This is a novel about truth, understanding, perspectives, meaning-making, and also connection, the necessity of the WE (but also it’s limits). Did I buy this book because the cover fit into the very orange palette of most of my reading (DAMN YOU, MICK HERRON.) Perhaps I did, but I’m so glad I did. This was an illuminating and surprising read, and a reminder that reading off the beaten track is so often incredibly rewarding.
And my ninth book was THE MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR AT STYLES, by Agatha Christie, our audiobook for the car journey, which (as usual, being no Poirot) I was completely confused by before the big reveal, but I enjoyed the ride all the same.
August 15, 2025
Blue Hours, by Alison Acheson
I really enjoyed Alison Acheson’s moody atmospheric novel Blue Hours, a story about fatherhood, and widowerhood, and what it means (and what it takes) to keep going. It’s also the story of a marriage, Keith and Raziel’s, through which they’d both aspired to defy convention. She was the breadwinner, a successful photographer, and he was the caretaker, a stay-at-home dad to their son Charlie. All the ways in which Raziel wasn’t like anybody else were part of what Keith loved best about her, but when he begins to sort through her things after her death, he discovers there were parts of Raziel’s life that he never knew about, he starts to wonder if he ever really knew her at all. All the while their 7-year-old son is processing his own grief, and Keith has to stay attentive to that, his son’s mind a mystery as great as his wife’s had been. And grief is its own kind of terrain, something Acheson knows about from her own experience—she’s author of a memoir about her husband’s death from ALS. Time marches on, and Keith needs to find a way for him and his son to go with it, and Blue Hours is a novel about enduring, artfully and evocatively wrought.
August 14, 2025
Guilty by Definition, by Susie Dent
Lexicographer, etymologist and TV personality Susie Dent is a pretty big deal in her native UK, that renown finding its way across the pond to the point where I was stopped by a stranger on the subway this week while I was reading her fiction debut, Guilty By Definition, who asked if she was same Susie Dent from 8 Out of 10 Cats, a question I was unable to answer at the time (turns out it’s a comedy panel show, and yes, she is!), but I told him the book was fascinating. It’s a murder mystery set in Oxford that begins with a mysterious letter delivered to the offices of the famous (and fictional) Clarendon English Dictionary, a letter rife with Shakespeare references that alludes to the unsolved disappearance of the newly appointed editor’s sister, who’d also worked for the dictionary, years before, the sleuthing intermingled with rare book lore, etymological wonders, and each chapter is named for a rare and perfect word like Chapter 27’s “engouement, noun, (nineteenth century): an irrational fondness.”
I will admit that the puzzles became too puzzling for me, who couldn’t solve a cryptic crossword to save my life or even know where to begin with one, and the characters in the novel lacked much emotional depth, but if the idea of a murder mystery all about words and their meanings, and dictionaries and the people who make them intrigues you at all, then you’ll find this book a rich delight.
August 12, 2025
Kakigori Summer, by Emily Itami
“There’ll be days when the way things are will make you weep, and the fact of the world is too heavy to get out from underneath. And then other days, when you can’t believe you’re here, with people you love in the world that contains barley tea and kakigori, sun after rain, watermelons and grumpy cat, and this front door. Hikaru runs through it, in such a rush he barely has time to get his shoes on, roaring at me that it’s time to go. Sunshine catches one half of his face, and the only thing I want to tell him is to keep his face turned towards it. The light, always the light.”
Emily Itami’s sophomore novel KAKIGORI SUMMER is a beautiful summer novel about sisterhood, the story of three sisters—the eldest working in finance in London, the second a single mother in Tokyo, and the third a famous J-pop star—who together retreat to their childhood home on the Japanese coast one summer after the youngest suffers a national scandal that puts her mental health at risk. Their mother has died years before, their English father lives his own life far across the sea with a new family, and their grumpy great-grandmother is impossible to get along with, which means the sisters are on their own, the way they’ve always been, making sense of their place in the world as mixed-race Japanese, if being “haafu” means that they’ll never be whole. And the novel explores the sisters’ unique position between two different cultures and ethnicities, as well as their legacy of mental illness and secrets, moving between three different characters’ voices to tell a story that sparkles like kakigori, the Japanese shaved ice dessert.
August 12, 2025
WRITERS & LOVERS
WRITERS & LOVERS made me a Lily King fan. (I am the only person in the world who was underwhelmed by her previous novel EUPHORIA.) But I also don’t remember all that much about W&L, except that it offered a lovely reprieve from pandemic lockdown doldrums during the winter of 2020. And then @streetavocados told me that King’s forthcoming novel HEART THE LOVER has a connection to W&L, and she was wild about the new book, which seems to be sentiment among everybody who has read early copies, and so I decided I needed a refresh, to reread W&L, and I’m so glad I did. Never ever have I read such a polished story about a life that was such an absolute mess, sort of like those gorgeous absorbing illustrations in Shirley Hughes books of rooms with all kinds of stuff piled up on tables and stuffed into corners. The way she writes about waitressing too, her portrayal of Casey’s work a glimpse into another world with its own vernacular and bizarre rituals, and the gamble of a creative life, which is something I’ve thought a lot more about since I read this book the first time (when I was on the cusp of publishing the sophomore novel I was hoping would be my breakout hit). W&L is a novel about life itself, which is a crummy way to some up most novels, but with this one, I actually think it means something, a book about grief, love, disappointment, friendship, money, hope, dreams, and broken promises. The kind of art that reads as effortless. I can’t wait to read what comes next.
