August 8, 2025
Bring the House Down, by Charlotte Runcie
Okay, here’s the irresistible premise: theatre critic and infamous nepo-baby prick Alex Lyons writes a scathing review for a one woman show at the Edinburgh Festival, and then proceeds to pick up that one woman (an actor called Hayley Sinclair) at a bar later that evening, her having no idea who he is, and they spend the night together. By morning, the one star review is in actual print across the nation, and Hayley actually discovers it in Alex’s flat, seeing the photo beside his byline, and making the connection—she is furious, and proceeds to revamp her show into a revenge fuelled feminist takedown which quickly becomes the talk of the festival and goes viral turning Alex Lyons into an international pariah, the poster boy for shitty men everywhere.
What I didn’t expect from Charlotte Runcie’s debut novel BRING THE HOUSE DOWN, however, (Runcie also published a beautiful nonfiction book a few years ago called SALT ON YOUR TONGUE: WOMEN AND THE SEA, which I enjoyed) was Sophie, Alex’s colleague, and the narrator of this story. An art critic, she’s sharing the flat with him in Edinburgh and unwittingly gains a front row sea on the drama, and what a curious seat it is, Sophie also working through her own problems as a new mother recently-returned-to-work and frustrated by her academic partner’s failure to share the load with her, resenting the ways in which her life has changed since their son was born, whereas his goes on the same (save for these weeks where she’s away in Edinburgh, a rare break). She’s also still grieving the loss of her mother, and wonders if she’s stayed with her partner because he is her only chance to be with somebody who knew her mum, whom her mother knew.
While BRING THE HOUSE DOWN lives up to expectations of its sensation and propulsiveness (because what a premise it is!), Sophie’s presence makes the novel something different than the usual commercial fare. And there were moments where I wished she hadn’t, where I felt as though she puts us as readers from a remove from the action (I want the sensation! I want the scandal! I want the dial turned up to MORE MORE MORE), I actually think this makes for a more interesting project, and the narrative arrangement itself is a comment on polarization, he said/she said, the quest for nuance, the need for there to be something in-between sometimes. Sometimes when people say they’re looking for the grey area between black and white, what they’re really telling you is that they’re firmly wedded to the status quo, but Runcie’s grey area via Sophie isn’t like that, is genuinely something more interesting.
And in the end, this book with a sensational premise actually becomes a meditation on culture and criticism, and what it means to exist in a culture that is forever RESPONDING to culture instead of creating it, which means that this isn’t just a novel that is fun to read, it’s also genuinely thoughtful and really interesting.
August 6, 2025
Milktooth, by Jamie Burnet
“I think the thing about life might be that it’s just hard, for no divine reason, and it will change you, with no preordained end, and it’s for you to decide whether the hardness hardens you or cracks you open.”
Oh my gosh, this novel is so good, stayed-up-past-my-bedtime good, because I had to see how it ended. (And how it ended! Wow!!). Jaime Burnet’s MILKTOOTH is absolutely spellbinding, and never misses a beat, the story of Sorcha, whose relationship with her girlfriend Chris fast becomes toxic and abusive, repeating patterns from Sorcha’s own childhood within her religious family from whom she’s been estranged since she came out to them. And while Sorcha knows that her relationship with Chris is not altogether healthy, she still wants to be with her, because otherwise what if she ends up alone and misses this one chance to fulfill her dream of having a baby?
But after she and Chris move to an isolated community in Cape Breton, leaving behind the close-knit queer community Sorcha had found for herself in Halifax, things between them only get worse, and when Sorcha finally gets pregnant, she decides there’s no way she can live with Chris anymore, fashioning an escape to the highlands of Scotland where she connects with her aunt, a midwife, who’s as estranged from the family as she is, and together they—along with Sorcha’s friends back home—begin to plot out a future for Sorcha and her baby.
With beautiful prose and gorgeously-rendered human characters (which is to say REAL), Burnet has created a story that swept me along, mesmerized. The dynamics of Sorcha and Chris’s relationship and of Chris’s emotional abuse are pitch-perfect and also hard to read in just how believable they are (how she wears Sorcha down; the gaslighting) and then just when it might be too much, Sorcha takes flight, and the triumph of her exit and everything that happens after that and also the solace and love of her friends—who are so steadfast, forgiving, and true—makes for the most moving, rich and also hilarious read. I loved it.
August 6, 2025
Born, by Heather Birrell
My propulsive reading recommendation for the summer of 2025 is Heather Birrell’s novel BORN, which grabbed me from the start and did not let go until its incredible perfect ending and even then not entirely. Gorgeous, compelling, fraught with tension, chasing shadows, full of light. Dazzlingly literary and unputdownable at once, this story of a high school English teacher who goes into labour during a lockdown is a polyphonic ode to caregiving, community, and public schools. It’s a fast paced read that will stay with you long after the final pages (which made me cry, they was so beautiful). Buy it! READ IT! (Or borrow it from your local library!)
August 5, 2025
The Road to Tender Hearts, by Annie Hartnett
In the acknowledgements for THE ROAD TO TENDER HEARTS, Annie Hartnett explains that her novel was born of a challenge she set for herself around 2021: could she take all her fears and anxieties (especially about death), and her worries about not being a good enough parent or capable enough person, and turn all of these things into a novel that was FUNNY? And reader, she did, she really did, this explanation going a long way toward making sense of this totally bonkers novel that manages to be not remotely off-putting even though it’s about grief after loss of a child, childhood sexual abuse, children who are orphaned in a murder suicide, and one tragic death after another as the narrative goes on, taking its reader on a road trip from the armpit of Massachusetts down to Texas, and then to Arizona where lottery winner and prototypical well-meaning but disappointing dad PJ Halliday hopes to be reunited with Michelle Cobb, the love of his life, whose husband’s obituary has only just appeared in the local paper.
The only complication is that he’s just been saddled with the care of his grand-niece and nephew after their parents’ tragic deaths, and PJ doesn’t have a great track record for care, really. His eldest daughter drowned in a cranberry bog on her prom night 15 years before, and his youngest, Sophie, barely speaks to him now, plus he’s spent the last decade and a half drinking away his pain. And okay, I lied, that’s not the only complication, in fact, everything is a complication for PJ at the moment, in particular that his ex-wife is about to depart on a trip to Alaska and PJ won’t be able to have breakfast every morning at her house anymore. Or that PJ doesn’t have a car anymore after his DUIs. Or Pancakes, the cat, which comes along on the journey and seems to have an instinct for when somebody is about to die…
How does Harnett get away with writing a comic novel about ALL THAT? By acknowledging the best and worst parts of people, by telling the truth, by demonstrating that LOVE means telling the truth, even when the truth is that the people we love or loved are profoundly flawed or terrible.
If you’re up for a sombre book about grief, leave this one alone, but if you’re in the mood for a story that will explode your ideas about what must be treated with seriousness and reverence in fiction, then THE ROAD TO TENDER HEARTS will likely be one of your favourite books of the summer too. Thanks to Stephanie at Betty’s Bookshelf in St. Mary’s, ON, for the recommendation.
July 31, 2025
Dark Like Under, by Alice Chadwick
The story begins so late at night that it might already be tomorrow, Robin and Jonah taking chances, walking on a weir, taking chances too in being together at all—Jonah is Robin’s best friend Tin’s sometime boyfriend. They’re pushing their luck. Something terrible is going to happen, it is clear, and just what that something terrible is comes into focus at an assembly at school the next day when the reviled head announces that a well-liked teacher, Mr. Adennes, whom Robin and Jonah had met on their meanderings the night before, is dead. And everything after that seems to ricochet, the narrative full of traps and holes, shifting between the perspectives of students and teachers moving forward through the day, their understanding of the tragedy seen through the lenses of their own experiences, informed by their own traumas and heartaches, grudges and preoccupations. Tin providing as much as a centre to this tale as anything, because she’s the kind of person who draws people to her (for better or for worse), who makes “hot, empty days sparkle like broken glass,” and their teacher’s death reaches back to something terrible that happened to her years before, the image of broken glass enduring throughout the text, shiny, sharp and dangerous.
Alice Chadwick’s DARK LIKE UNDER, set in the 1980s admist the community of a grammar school in northern England, is slow, character-driven, intensely engaging at the sentence level, and disorienting as the story moves between characters, deep into their minds, their pasts, into their homes, class distinctions usually unspoken, but ever-defining. It’s a deep dive into a dark sea, and beautifully spellbinding.
July 29, 2025
Summer Goodness
Last weekend we went away again, and I brought along Liz Moore’s 2020 novel LONG BRIGHT RIVER on a camping trip out of nostalgia for the weekend I spent last summer utterly absorbed in Moore’s GOD OF THE WOODS at the same park, and it was no surprise just how much it delivered because my husband and teen had already read the book before me and both of them loved it. And I did too (I’ve heard it said that it might be better than GOD OF THE WOODS, which I think is true, although GOD… subverted my expectations in the most interesting ways and this novel was a little more conventional). It’s the story of Mickey a police officer in Philadelphia’s gritty Kensington neighbourhood who lives in fear of one day coming upon the body of her sister, Kacey, a longtime addict, on one of her patrols, and for whom the line between her professional and personal lives become blurred when it appears that a serial killer is targeting vulnerable women in the neighbourhood. It’s a gripping mystery with all kinds of twists, but also a searing indictment of police corruption and incredible human cost of current drug crises, including opioid addiction and drug poisonings.
July 25, 2025
Second Life, by Amanda Hess
I remember how, when I became pregnant with my first child in 2008, the internet was an oracle. Google searches: signs of pregnancy, how to tell if i’m pregnant, am i pregnant. I had no trouble getting pregnant at all, and yet still found my way onto forums where I learned acronyms like TTC, DH, and people talked about “baby dust.” (Not long after, a friend had a miscarriage, and found her way onto forums where people who weren’t very good at spelling talked about their angles.) And then once my pregnancy was confirmed, I’d signed up for Baby Centre updates, through which I received weekly emails with news about my baby’s development, all of this supplemented by regular google searches about what pregnancy symptoms I should be experiencing week by week, because everything about my pregnancy in the first half of it (when not being mediated by machines like the dopplar or by ultrasound scans) was incredibly hard to believe in.
Fast forward a decade and a bit, and this lunacy has increased exponentially, and now it’s wrapped up in capitalism in a way it wasn’t yet when I was cruising Baby Centre and didn’t yet have a smart phone, so there were still no apps. “First I had learned to track my periods, then my pregnancy, and now I was tracking my kids from a surveillance camera perched above their beds,” writes New York Times reporter Amanda Hess in her memoir reportage hybrid, Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age, which is less a parenting book than a book that probes the way we parent as mediated by technology, and it’s absolutely blown up since I was in the thick of it, for example I had no idea that Dr. Harvey Karp (of THE HAPPIEST BABY ON THE BLOCK fame, whom we named Dr. Douchebag at our house because we had the unhappiest baby in the universe) had invented a robot crib that performs his 5 S’s for you. Or that you can buy special socks that track your baby’s vital signs, preying on every anxious parent’s worst tendencies. And then there’s all the screening available in utero, and Hess’s experience of this is complicated by her own child’s prenatal diagnosis, and experiences with disability, prompting her to become curious about the free birthing movement and also the “medical mama” online phenomenon as a counterpoint, and the way that millennial parents deal with their children’s behaviour with scripts from online influencers like Big Little Feelings. All of it fascinating, and Hess is reflective enough to see parts of herself and her experience in the different kinds of parenting she explores in her work, even the absurd parts—though she draws the line at the chiropractor who advises her that her son’s disability was caused by her own experiences of “self-devaluation” during pregnancy, whose entire approach is born from an antisemitic conspiracy theory, slamming the door closed on that particularly rabbit hole entirely.
I kept talking about this book to my husband, whose phone was listening, and then suddenly I started getting ads for the very period tracking app discussed in the book, though I hadn’t mentioned it by name at all. The brave new world out there for pregnant people and parents is a wild one, and a book like this goes a long toward generating some vital and necessary critical thinking regarding just what this technology is all about it, and what it’s doing to us and the way we see the world—and each other.
July 23, 2025
Last Week’s Summer Reads
Once again, summer reads stacked up like a dream, this time on last week’s trip to the Lanaudiere region of Quebec, where we fell in love with the cleanest lake, shared a lawn with a fat groundhog, went swimming every day, and had fires almost every evening in the company of wonderful friends, the very best time. And the books were just as book, eclectic, fun, sparkling and magical.
I began with Jess Walter’s SO FAR GONE, which I picked up at Spark Books in Perth en-route (actually on the recommendation of David Worsley from Words Worth Books in Waterloo). I read and adored Walter’s BEAUTIFUL RUINS on a summer holiday years ago, and this very different kind of story proved just as rich and satisfying. It’s about a man who has retreated to a secluded property in Washington State after his long career in journalism fizzled out with the industry and after he punched his conspiracy nut son-in-law in the face during Thanksgiving in 2016. And then all these years, there are two children on his doorstep whom he fails to recognize as his grandchildren, and SO FAR GONE is the story of his wobbly redemption as he is forced to return to to the world and save his grandkids from the dangerous militia their dad has become embroiled with. Funny, thoughtful, twisty, and absorbing, this one is definitely a highlight of the summer.
Next up I read KAKIGORI SUMMER, by Emily Itami (who is Japanese, but writes in English, and whose text engages with Japanese kanji in the most interesting way), which I bought at Words Worth in Waterloo the week before, and which is going to be a highlight of the year. I’d previously read Itami’s novel FAULT LINES, and liked it very much, but this one is even better, the story of three Japanese sisters (their mother is dead, their father is barely known to them, living with a new family in his native England) whose lives are far apart but who come together again when the youngest—a pop star—becomes embroiled in a national scandal. Together, along with the middle sister’s young son, they all return to their childhood home, and the company of their prickly great grandmother, and are forced to make sense of their history, the possibilities for their future, all the promises of a beautiful, imperfect world, and the fragility of life itself.
I read Mick Herron’s DEAD LIONS after that, the second book in the SLOW HORSES series. I’ve not seen the TV show, but am enjoying the books a lot, and my husband who is two books ahead of me claims that the series continues to be great. It’s a spy thriller that subverts expectations at every turn, such a fresh take on a familiar genre, so that it continues to be cozy and surprising at once, and also so prescient—this one’s about the Russian threat lying dormant after the fall of the USSR and just waiting to spring up again.
And then I read THREE SUMMERS, by Margarita Liberaki, a recommendation with Teri Vlassopoulos via Julia Zarankin, an English translation of a Greek classic published in 1946, another book about three sisters coming of age in a bucolic idyll that feels worlds away from where Greece actually was at the time of publication. Dreamlike, steeped in heat and atmosphere, the story is strange and surprising, secrets and hidden strengths and weaknesses revealed, the story itself ever changing amidst a world where so much stays the same.
Next up was LANDLINES, by Rainbow Rowell, which came out in 2014 and I recall readers feeling let down by, and so I didn’t have any expectations. I fell in love with Rowell’s work when I finally read ATTACHMENTS, and then ELEANOR & PARK, and her most recent books, SLOW DANCE (which I loved SO MUCH). Perhaps fans of her super-hit FAN GIRL weren’t as interesting in LANDLINES, a time-bending story about a long marriage, and motherhood, the middle-agedness of it all, but that’s what SLOW DANCE is all about, and it’s right up my street. I loved it, and now keep listening to “Leather and Lace” and not even ironically.
And then finally, HERE ONE MOMENT, by Liane Moriarty, whose books I LOVE, but I didn’t rush after this one when it came out because the premise was so odd (it’s about a plane full of people to whom a mysterious passenger delivers each of their precise dates and causes of death) and PREMISEY. I didn’t love Moriarty’s novel NINE PERFECT STRANGERS, and while I appreciate her urge to spread her creative wings and not simply rewrite BIG LITTLE LIES over and over, I felt her latest might be more of the same. But it really surprised me, and I enjoyed it so much, especially Moriarty’s beautiful talent for investing difficult characters with the most human and sympathetic edges. The story had me GRIPPED, but I had to put it down unfinished on our last night away, and throughout the six hour drive home, I was so looking forward to finally getting to the end, the most delicious anticipation.
July 11, 2025
On the Calculation of Volume 1, by Solvej Balle
I will only mention Bill Murray this once, and not even name his film’s title that’s become iconic enough to eclipse the film itself, standing in for a narrative approach so overdone that it might be hard to imagine it could be made interesting. And then along comes Danish writer Solvej Balle with a request for us to hold her beer after she, according to a blurb on the back of her novel from LE FIGARO , “went into exile on an island for more than twenty years” and returned with ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME, whose first two volumes have been translated into English by Barbara J. Haveland, the first of which I read on a camping trip the weekend before last.
The premise is this. Tara Selter, antiquarian bookseller, has just spent the last 121 days awakening every morning to another November 18 (alas, without Sonny and Cher). It all started on a business trip to Paris, unfathomably strange. Eventually she makes her way back to the home in Northern France that she shares with her husband, Thomas, who is also her business partner, and when we find her, she is hiding out in her spare room because she eventually tired of having to explain to Thomas day after day what she was doing at home instead of Paris, where she’s supposed to be.
This is a quiet narrative, as confined as Tara is within a single day, a limited geography (though apparently the world expands in subsequent volumes). She comes to know all the patterns, when she’ll hear birdsong, when her husband returns home, what the weather will be, everything always the same, although there are strange deviations—sometimes things she acquires one day travels with her into her next day, and other days these acquisitions disappear. Trying to figure out some kind of pattern or logic beneath what’s happening to her becomes a major preoccupations in the her first 50 days or so, but eventually her energy in that direction peters out.
Tara’s loneliness permeates the text, the relief of finding her beloved Thomas eventually ceasing to satisfy her because she realizes how fundamentally she’s alienated from him, even when they are fortunate enough to be together. She realizes that she’s embarked upon a journey that he cannot be part of, no matter how much he wants to be, no matter how much they love each other—which reminds me of what couples experience when one is undergoing a serious illness or even dying, the impossibility of true togetherness, the meagreness of the togetherness they have.
I happen to be rereading Frankenstein right now, and recognize a similar tone in the two novel’s first-person addresses, Tara too a kind of monster, outside the ordinary, people responding to her situation with confusion and disbelief. She spends the novel similarly skulking in the margins (she refers to herself as a ghost), peering in lit windows, set apart from the ordinariness of human experience which she so longs for.
The Calculation of Volume tells an extraordinary story, but what its narrator goes through will be familiar to many readers, underlining the story’s poignancy. This very specific, unlikely tale brings with it a certain universality. Tara tells us, “It seems so odd to me now how one can be so unsettled by the improbable. When we know that our entire existence is founded on freak occurrences and improbable coincidences. That we wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t for these curious twists of fate. That there are human beings on what we call our planet, that we can move around on a rotating sphere in a vast universe full of inconceivably large bodies comprised of elements so small that the mind simple cannot comprehend how small and how many there are… Anyone would think that this knowledge would equip us in some small way to face the improbable. But the opposite appears to be the case…”
July 9, 2025
10 Essential Lessons for Writers from Bookspo Season 3
And that’s a wrap for the third season of my BOOKSPO podcast, which I had a very good time making and which features guests whose books I endorse heartily. If you haven’t listened to BOOKSPO yet (the podcast in which I talk to authors of new books about the old books that inspire their work), now is a great time to begin, and you’ll also get a taste of some great Canadian books published this spring. And to give you a taste of that taste, here is a list of essential writing advice from this season’s podcast guests.
Episode One: The Immortal Woman, by Su Chang
The writer seeking something approaching truth needs to read widely, from different sources, in different languages if possible, putting all these pieces together and looking for coherence.
Episode Two: Good Victory, by Mikka Jacobsen
Well-crafted fiction can indeed blend the real with the fantastical, the serious with the truly absurd.
Episode Three: Who By Water, by Greg Rhyno
You don’t necessarily need to describe your character’s physicality. Sometimes a single detail will entirely evoke her on the page.
Episode Four: The Fun Times Brigade, by Lindsay Zier-Vogel
Books can take their writers (as well as readers!) into a rarefied world that can be thrilling to explore.
Episode Five: Only Because It’s You, by Rebecca Fisseha
Commercial fiction looks easy, but it’s actually hard to write because there’s no place to hide.
Episode Six: Detective Aunty, by Uzma Jalaluddin
Writing ANYTHING can train you to write a novel.
Episode Seven: Skin, by Catherine Bush
Amazing things can happen when a writer allows her characters to want what they shouldn’t want and to confront the unexpected.
Episode Eight: Living Expenses, by Teri Vlassopoulos
Details of a woman’s body and a woman’s life are interesting.
Episode Nine: Born, by Heather Birrell
Trust your own voice and what it’s telling about what your book is supposed to be.
Episode Ten: A Most Puzzling Murder, by Bianca Marais
Relish the creative challenge of pushing at the limits of what a book can hold and also of who you are as a writer.
