January 22, 2026
Margaret’s New Look, by Katherine Ashenburg
Margaret’s New Look, Katherine Ashenburg’s third novel is a veritable feast—both an ode to and an interrogation of fashion history; as well as a consideration of Vichy France, European Jewish history, and the Holocaust; a contemporary portrait of catty workplace politics, and a mystery set in a museum with some truly delicious detective fiction allusions. As curator Margaret Abrams prepares for an upcoming exhibit featuring items from Christian Dior’s legendary collection, she is distracted by calls from a reporter asking about Dior’s ties to Nazis forces in occupied Paris earlier in his career. And then strange items begin arriving in the mail, questions persist about Margaret’s own family’s Jewish history, and then items from the exhibit begin to go missing, turning up in strange places elsewhere in the museum. Who is behind the sabotage? Is it possible to appreciate beauty for simply beauty’s sake, or must Dior’s collection be embroiled with history and politics, just like so many more sordid things? Margaret is going to have to learn to be unsettled, both personally and professionally, as she gets to the bottom of the mystery in an effort to save the exhibit, although she’s aided by her detective fiction-writing husband and twelve-year-old twin daughters who have their own predilection solving puzzles just like this one. Moving, surprising, and full of fascinating research, Margaret’s New Look is also fun.
January 20, 2026
Sharing the Light, by Monique Gray Smith
I think it’s because I already know her light that Monique Gray Smith’s Sharing the Light: Stories and Reflections means a little more to me to me than it might have otherwise. Having personally received its brilliant warmth, I can attest to the goodness—though that stunning cover would have attracted my attention all the same.
In November 2019, after her picture book My Heart Fills With Happiness was selected for the TD Grade One Giveaway and distributed to students across Canada, including my daughter, which I posted about on social media, Smith DM’d me to say she would be visiting Toronto to receive an award from the First Nations Community Reads Awards program, and she wondered if she could squeeze in a visit to my daughter’s school, the response from me and the school and everybody an emphatic YES, PLEASE. And what transpired was the most beautiful gathering, Smith sharing her light in the most gorgeous and generous way, the kind of togetherness whose loss I so grieved as the pandemic began not long after, and my children didn’t go to school for a long time.
And then sometime during that sad pandemic year, Smith created a short podcast series called “Love is Medicine,” whose message I clung to as I dealt with my own anxiety and grief about what we were all experiencing, and it helped me so much, such a counter to the messages of doom and gloom that were permeating my consciousness from everywhere else. Instead, with calm and kindness, and born from her own experiences of overcoming adversity, Smith told a different kind of story, one of quiet strength, persistence, possibility, and the hope that is found when we connect to each other.
These same messages are what Smith conveys in Sharing the Light, a book that seems very simple on its surface (some of its pages have just a handful of words), but which is quietly profound, and brave, and not without its twists (the part where she drives 150 miles an hour around a race track!!). Smith writes about gratitude, love, joy, happiness, and hope, about the power and abundance of these elements, and how the simple act of paying attention to them can strengthen our hearts and transform our lives, even in the most difficult of winters.
January 19, 2026
Dangerous Memory: Coming of Age in the Decade of Greed, by Charlie Angus
That the 1980s never really ended, as Charlie Angus argues in his memoir Dangerous Memory: Coming of Age in the Decade of Greed, has been remarkably clear than in the last couple of weeks with unrest in Iran, American interference in Central America, ongoing turmoil in Afghanistan, and dangerous bluster and violence on the part of the not-so-super superpowers, America and Russia. And the 1980s were where the race to the bottom began, with governments in the US, UK, and Canada selling off public resources, corporate raiders dismantling profitable companies, and good jobs being shipped overseas to where wages were much lower, the labour movement left much reduced in power and workers paid the price.
But that wasn’t all, Angus notes, his notes sociological study blended with personal biography as he shares his own experiences in a punk band and as an activist during that tumultuous decade (as well as his later experiences as a Canadian Member of Parliament). The “decade of greed” was also a powerful era of people power, where social movements led to incredible change that no one would have seen coming at the beginning of the decade—the fall of the Soviet Union, great strides to protect the environment, movement toward nuclear disarmament. These are what Angus (borrowing the phrase from theology professor Candace McLean) calls “dangerous memories,” dangerous to those in power for how they are also the seeds of hope and resistance.
Like John Ganz’s acclaimed When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, Angus’s Dangerous Memory connects the dots and fills in the blanks as to how we got from there to here—the 1990s, he writes, was when “we pissed it all away. Angus addresses international politics, the attack on labour, the drug crisis, homelessness, the AIDs epidemic, and so much more, using the recent past to make of the chaos of the present, and to offer a path forward toward into a different and better kind of story.
January 14, 2026
The Tenant, by M. Berry
In The Tenant, by M. Barry (a pseudonym for the writer Michelle Berry), bestselling thriller writer Amy Ellis has been unable to write anything since birth of her daughter, but hopes that her family’s year-long sojourn to Freiburg, Germany, delivers a solution to this—her husband has a contract at a non-profit there, their daughter will be enrolled in daycare, her husband’s company has secured the family with a lovely rental house. Except that the house comes with unexpected feature, a tenant, a slightly odd English woman called who’s living in the attic flat. A double booking, maybe? Eleanor is a bit vague about it, and nobody seems able to contact the landlord, and so Amy and her husband decide to just live with it. Eleanor seems harmless enough, and she begins to help out with Amy’s daughter, delivering her to and from her preschool, leaving Amy’s days free to finally write her book—a novel inspired by a series of mysterious killings that are dominating news headlines.
But the reader, of course, is privy to Eleanor’s point of view, and soon learns that the tenant is not so harmless after all. And that her presence is Amy’s rental house is part of a carefully laid out plan that Amy has no idea she is walking straight into, and that the thriller that she’s writing is actually her real life, a story with shades of Misery or The Shining.
I tore through this book in a day, and got more and more gripped as the tension ramped up. And while I can’t say that the plot was watertight—there were some holes; it was baggy in places—this was still a satisfying, riveting, and most enjoyable read.
January 14, 2026
Black Cherokee, by Antonio Michael Downing
“If casting out our Ophelias wounds us, we can only become whole by restoring them. By making room for the possibility of transcendence. Of being both. Of being beyond both.” —Antonio Michael Downing
Okay, buckle up, because Antonio Michael Downing’s Black Cherokee is a novel with a voice, a voice that conveys the story of Ophelia Blue Rivers with the swiftness and drive of the very river that runs through the town of Etsi, skirting the property belonging to Ophelia’s grandmother, Grandma Blue, who has the same name as Ophelia, the same name as the first Black baby in Etsi generations ago (but not so many generations ago). Etsi—which means “mother” in Cherokee language—is a fictional community in South Carolina, home to Black and Cherokee communities that live together, but also apart, Grandma Blue and her late husband Chief Trouthands becoming the exception to that rule when they fell in love. But after Chief Trouthands dies, the rest of the community—against Grandma Blue’s advice—is persuaded to disband, their land sold to rich white men of industry, and now the river is polluted. The story following Ophelia Blue—who is neither Black nor Cherokee, but instead half of each and “all mixed up”—from her early childhood in Etsi, to the Black church evangelical community from which she tries to find belonging, to her experiences as a student enrolled in a special program for bright Black students at an otherwise all-white high school, and finally to her life on the cusp of adulthood and autonomy as she is finally forced to take a step on her own journey, instead of one that seems set out for her on the basis of who she is or isn’t or who her family was.
Sweeping, funny, poignant, and honest, full of music and magic and butterflies, Downing’s narrative shimmers, sings, and shines, transcends and delights. A beautiful feat of imagination and possibility, I really loved this book.
January 13, 2026
The Folded Leaf, by William Maxwell
I LOVE William Maxwell, love, love, LOVE William Maxwell, whose novels are the most curious blend of realism and modernism, and who writes about men, love, and longing so very tenderly. For the last few years, I’ve read one of his novels over the winter break, but I think I’ve read his better known books and so my local secondhand bookstores were turning up nothing, and finally I couldn’t take the void and ordered a copy of his 1945 novel The Folded Leaf, a story of male friendship set in the 1920s. (What set me over the edge was the email I received from my friend Julia reading, “OMG KERRY I don’t think you impressed upon me just how brilliant and devastating THEY CAME LIKE SWALLOWS really is. oh how i loved that novel.” [I actually think that receiving such novels is the meaning of life.])
And I liked it so very much. And while I was reading it, I was THRILLED to see a Substack Note from author Brandon Taylor who was reading The Cheateau, which was my first William Maxwell book, and Taylor writes, “This novel is warm, funny, but also probing and wise and profound about surfaces, about illusions, by the yearning for meaning, about the strangeness of travel, about the mystery of human relationships. It is social, historical, but also timeless. I just loved it. LOVED IT. SO MUCH. I CANNOT STOP THINKING ABOUT IT. AMAZING BOOK.” (William Maxwell. He makes us emphatic. We can’t help it.)
He also remarks on Maxwell’s 1980 novel So Long, See You Tomorrow being way overhyped, which was interesting because it was the one novel of his that did not move me at all, but I had assumed that the problem was mine. Maxwell’s work can be a little bit difficult, usually where difficulty might not be expected, a bit strange, uncanny, and tricky to decipher in places—there were threads in The Folded Leaf I had a hard time following. I had assumed I wasn’t reading well with So Long…, but maybe it’s just not his best work. Which is fine, because his best work is so good.
The Folded Leaf is the story of two high school boys who are both misfits in their own way, and who end up being best friends, but neither of them are ever able to articulate just what their connection means to them, or what its parameters are, which means things end up being very messy and complicated as they move through the years, going off to university together, Lymie making all the grades, Spud becoming a boxing star, much to his mother’s chagrin. Where does one boy end and the other begin? The novel’s climax is brutal and devastating.
January 13, 2026
DEFINITELY THRIVING in PEOPLE
This cool news today! Read it here.
And reviews are coming in:
“…a bravado blend of Barbara Pym and Bridget Jones.” —Library Journal
January 12, 2026
Days of Feasting and Rejoicing, by David Bergen
“It was too dangerous, and fantasy so easily descended into violence and delirium. To act, or not act. Was it that simple? What consequences would she suffer? She looked down at the hands in her lap. Oh, Esther. What will you do?”
Lines are blurred in David Bergen’s novel Days of Feasting and Rejoicing, between truth and fantasy, right and wrong, between a person and another. The novel begins in Bali where two young white women who live in Thailand are travelling, and then one of them ends up dead. The other woman, Esther Maile, flies back to Thailand on the dead woman’s passport, and continues to behave curiously, although the narrative is so firmly fixed in her twisted mind that it’s hard to see what’s really happening. Eventually Police Inspector Net Wantok’s point of view enters the story, and we see him struggling to put together the pieces of the puzzle, which become extra puzzling after the dead girl’s brother flies to Thailand to find out what happened to his sister, and he disappears. Dark, unsettling, and impeccably executed, I was totally riveted by this story, which was so deliciously disturbing.
January 7, 2026
BOOKSPO is Back!
Season 4 of Bookspo is HERE, and it’s better than ever. Listen to my conversation with Kate Cayley about her beautiful and propulsive novel PROPERTY here, or wherever you get your podcasts.
January 7, 2026
Important Household Update
I’d be remiss to not post about our new couch, just because each of our previous couches arrived with official announcements. The first one in 2007, which was monumental for having replaced our futon, which (unbelievably) suggests that we spent two years with only a futon for seating in our apartment when we first moved to Toronto—it’s so strange to consider the things that pass for normal when one is broke and 25. (The futon was purchased back when there were two futon stores on a single block of Bloor Street east of Bathurst, and would go on to become our daughter’s big girl bed when she finally moved out of a crib.)
By 2007, we were both gainfully employed, and so we bought the couch, although I can’t fathom now why we selected that one. Were our parameters HUGE, HIDEOUS, and BROWN, and this was the one that checked all the boxes? I can definitely say that it was comfortable though, the comfiest couch that ever couched, and we got it before toxic scotch-guarding was made illegal so it was able to rise to the challenge of our very leaky small children, and then once those children were old enough to leak less, we replaced it with a more stylish option.
Because it was 2018, it was a very internet couch, and even came with its own hashtag, and like all things on the internet, it would fail to live up to our expectations. The fabric got kind of gnarly, it was not that comfortable, and then one, day early last month, I discovered that the spring had poked through the bottom of the frame, and we were honestly relieved, glad to see it go, our internet couch. (To the couch’s credit, while the children no longer leak, they are bigger, and they are lounging on that couch perpetually. That couch never caught a break. There are couches that live in rooms where nobody ever sits, but we only have one room, and people are sitting all the time. It’s a hard knock life.)
And so now there is a new couch, one without a hashtag, purchased from a wholesale place in Burlington, and it’s just a little bit longer than its predecessor, which is good, because we watch movies in our family sitting four in a row, which has become a tighter squeeze as time has passed, and we welcome the addition of some wiggle room. But other than that, the acquisition of this couch has been mostly non-monumental, which perhaps is monumental in itself—I’ve stopped measuring life in chesterfields. Now in our mid/late forties, we’ve arrived at a moment where such a thing as a new couch is almost ordinary.
