October 28, 2025
Reading Habits
Saturday happiness is plenty of books coverage in my Toronto Star, and even happier happiness is my own book (WHAT??) mentioned in formidable company—along with 12 copies of the Bible and Archie comics!—as Ann Y.K. Choi shares her reading habits and celebrates the release of her new novel, ALL THINGS UNDER THE MOON. Thanks to Ann for saying lovely things about ASKING FOR A FRIEND and including it in your round-up. And if you know Ann, you’ll know that this kindness and generosity is most characteristic. I’m so looking forward to reading her book!
Read the whole piece here (gift link).
October 24, 2025
The Longest Night, by Lauren Carter
Okay, this book was totally bananas. And also made me very uncomfortable, and disoriented, and I had no idea what trajectory the narrative was going to take, which put me in league with the protagonist, but I also could not put it down, and it was all so fascinatingly mind-bending and satisfying that I think I actually loved it. Lauren Carter’s The Longest Night begins in Minnesota on the winter solstice in 2021 when Ash Hayes finds herself locked out in the frigid cold after escaping another one of her parents’ fights the night before her best friend’s father’s funeral. She’s left her phone inside, her frantic knocking brings no response, and she’s not dressed for the elements, frostbite already setting in, and so it seems like her only choice is to make it to a distant neighbour’s place, and the next thing she knows, she’s waking up in the strangest place.
It’s a house like something out of a time warp, no modern technology, the kitchen appliances are olive green. There are boxes and boxes of stuff, the windows are sealed, her clothes are gone, her hand is bandaged, and the only thing she can find to keep warm is fur stole still with its fox’s head. And it’s here where she meets Lucille and the doctor, the curious people who seem to be holding Ash hostage with especially nefarious intentions that won’t become clear for some time and will culminate in a horrifying act of sexual abuse.
When Ash manages to escape their clutches (although not for long—they’ll come and bring her back again) she discovers that the weird house and its inhabitants are only the beginning of bizarre happenings, for it seems that every time she ventures outside, it’s the morning of September 11, 2001, a day of great importance for the entire world, but for Ash’s life in particular—it’s a day that set events in motion that would lead not only to the death of the baby brother Ash never got to meet (she was born in June of the following year), but also to the death of Ash’s best friend’s father, Frank, who would take his own life after years of PTSD following tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9-11. So is here her chance to alter fate and save the people she loves? But what about the laws of time travel, which Ash is aware of after years of watching TV with her grandmother, not to mention the beginning of her university studies in astrophysics? Should she adhere to those rules and try not to change future? How does the future still manage to seem so random and unknown even when you have an idea of what happens next? And how did Ash get herself into this time loop? Is there any way that she’ll be able to defeat the evil doctor with his omnipotent powers and get back to her time?
There is tough stuff in this novel, parts of the abuse which Ash is subject to that is difficult to read, and yet Carter balances this with the real love and warmth in her life from her best friend and her grandmother, and also with fascinating questions about fate and destiny, borrowing all kinds of fun time travel tropes from popular culture. (At one point, Lucille and the doctor show up at Ash’s parents’ place with a photo of her, asking, “Has anybody seen this girl?”) At a certain point I was fully invested, buckled in for the wild ride, and I just really hoped that Carter would find a satisfying way to resolve this bonkers story of time loops and quantum leaps—which she absolutely does.
October 22, 2025
Pick a Colour, by Souvankham Thammavongsa
Souvankham Thammavongsa’s debut novel Pick a Colour—following four poetry collections, and her Giller-winning story collection How to Pronounce Knife—is a short book that packs a real punch, narrated by Ning, an ex-boxer, now proprietor of a nail salon at which all the staff wear the same name-tag, “Susan,” just so that the worker that clients ask for will always be available, and the clients never know the difference anyway. The novel takes place over the course of a workday, Ning treating the narrative as carefully as she engages with her clients, providing just enough extraneous detail, but nothing more than she needs to, her narrative voice guarded and spiky, careful and strategic. The sense that she’s a fighter remains long after she’s put her boxing gloves away, but now she’s fighting to run her business in a tough and competitive environment, where customers need to be brought in and turned over, and the polish has to be watered down in order to make it last.
Pick a Colour is written in English, but there are only a few instances of spoken English in the book, uttered by clients. Otherwise, the dialogue in the novel, while shown in English, actually takes place in Bing’s own language (which I presume to be Lao, though Thammavongsa does not specify), the nail salon’s clients as oblivious to the context as they are to everything else going on around them—although there are a few instances where they nearly twig to the fact that they’re being made fun of, but Bing and her staff will never admit it (and let’s face it, they have it coming).
Pick a Colour is a hardheaded narrative of tough stuff, underlined by fierce love, humour, kindness, and humanity. One day in a nail salon, as crafted by Thammavongsa, is also a meditation on community, beauty, gender, class, and care.
October 21, 2025
The Witch of Willow Sound, by Vanessa F. Penney
It was that cover that won me over first, and then it turned up on the inaugural CIBA Booksellers’ List among other stellar selections, and so when I finally got my hands on a copy of The Witch of Willow Sound, by Vanessa F. Penney, at Word in the Street in Toronto, I had to buy it. Even though stories of magic and witches aren’t always my speed, but there was something about Penney’s narrative—plain spoken, understated, somehow embedded in the actual world—that held me fast even when wild things were happening. And it’s the perfect book for October, Chapter 1 opening with Phaedra “Fade” Luck waking up from a slumber beneath a tombstone, “frost in my hair and bony little fingers digging in my hoodie pocket.” (The fingers belong to a skinny raccoon who is after her half-finished bag of ketchup chips.) She’s mostly estranged from her mother, but it turns out there’s no one else her mother can call when Fade’s Aunt Madeleine is reported missing, Fade tasked with travelling to Aunt Madeleine’s dreamy little cottage built on a cliff above the Northumberland Strait in Nova Scotia where she hasn’t been since her mother and aunt broke off contact more than 20 years before. But when Fade arrives, nothing is the way it’s supposed to be—the house is decaying, the gardens are dead, there’s almost no sign of Aunt Madeleine, and officials from the neighbouring town of Grand Tea (a somewhat nefarious place whose inhabitants live under the constant thread of being crushed by a mountain) seem far too up in Aunt Madeleine’s business. Meanwhile, a hurricane is approaching that threatens to flatten Aunt Madeleine’s little house for good and eliminate any chance that Fade will ever be able to figure out what’s happened to her once beloved aunt. But with her own doggedness (and useful detective skills), plus the help of a trusted archivist (every book needs one!) Fade might just be able to learn the true story of her family’s history—if she’s brave enough to face it! This fun and twisty story is also an ode to the wisdom of nature and the women who carry it, as well as reminder of the importance of balance and the way that histories will haunt us unless we are honest about what our stories really are.
October 20, 2025
Call Me Gray, by Andrew Larsen, Bells Larsen, and Tallulah Fontaine
Some things are hard to intuit, difficult to understand if you only know about it in theory, instead of in practice, or if you only learn about it via, say, the Harry Potter lady’s unhinged tweets. As somebody whose gender has usually fit comfortably, I actually can imagine a very different world from the one I live in—where I happen to be surrounded by a wide range of gender expression and encountering trans people is an unremarkable everyday occurrence—where transness might be tricky to get my head around. And the reason why it’s not tricky is because I know people whose lives and stories are what we’re talking about when we’re talking about those things that other people like to yell about on Twitter, and let me tell you that this kind of knowledge—created of human connection and understanding—makes all the difference in the world.
And this kind of bridge between experiences serves as the foundation of CALL ME GRAY, the new picture book by my friend Andrew Larsen and his son, the musician Bells Larsen, illustrated by Tallulah Fontaine. It’s the story of a parent and child partaking in their annual tradition of constructing a backyard ice rink, the same way they do every year, continuity and tradition being oh so important—except that one thing has changed. Being a boy, the child explains to their dad, just doesn’t feel right. Which the father doesn’t understand at first—when asked if he ever feels mixed up about who he is, the father answers, ‘”I feel mixed up about a lot of things… I think most people do.”‘ It takes some time for him to actually catch on, as the two work together to build their rink.
Later the child tries again, “‘My name feels like an itchy sweater,’ I tell him. ‘I want to change it… [W]ill you call me Gray?'” The father answers, “‘I’ll try.'” And while the father doesn’t get it right immediately, he gets there eventually, the two completing the rink with their usual rituals of the first skate and hot chocolate, all those things that don’t have to change just because other things do.
What gifts the child in this book offers their parent—wisdom, trust, and the opportunity to receive their child’s essential self with abject love. Humanity is at the core of all of this, and CALL ME GRAY provides some hints for how we ought to show up for each other, whether the other person in question is our own child or somebody else’s.
October 17, 2025
Learning
Brunswick Avenue, north of Bloor, has just been resurfaced, which makes flying down the bike lane there there smoothest and most exhilarating experience, and I was doing so not long ago on the most beautiful day (we’ve had a lot of those lately), speeding past the small group gathered at the Little Free Library, perusing the titles available, and there are always people there, a fact which, along with the blue blue sky, underlined me to how just how much the world was beneficent and people were good. And I felt a familiar compulsion to climb up on an online soapbox to declare this fact, because I’m still not entirely over the instinct that a feeling isn’t truly felt until it’s been broadcast on the internet. And thinking about this made me realize how much of my anxiety over the last ten years or more stemmed from me feeling responsible for the world in this way, in proving that hope was reasonable and that we were worth fighting for.
Which is weird, in a way, because doesn’t me feeling like I had to work so hard to make it true suggest I didn’t wholly believe it myself? The other evolution in my thinking since then, in addition to that I’m not responsible for proving the goodness of the world, is that that world actually isn’t good. Or isn’t just good. The way I’d wanted it to be, like managing to get a snapshot, A HA! There, you see, demonstrable evidence! I read a book earlier this year where the author reflected on how she used to think that we were all *this close* to getting on the right track politically, and then everything would be fine after that, and I could so relate to that naivete. And what I understand now is that the world is brutal, terrible, wondrous, perfect, violent, loving, balanced, unfair, beautiful, ugly, predictable, explosive, safe, dangerous, and miraculous all at the same time. The world (and its human inhabitants) are so many things, but “perfectable” isn’t one of them, and maybe I’m learning to accept this? That the world will always be good and bad in equal measure, and we can still love it all the same.
October 16, 2025
I Make My Own Fun, by Hannah Beer
I LOVED I Make My Own Fun, the debut novel by UK journalist Hannah Beer, which has just been published in North America by House of Anansi Press. It’s a gripping, hilarious, agonizingly homicidally perfect take on celebrity, told from the perspective of the world famous and universally adored movie star, Marina, whose fans revere her to no end and track her every move, and who is able to control every aspect of her life and her press so that nobody suspects that she’s anything except the benevolent humanist that she pretends to be. Except that she’s actually a monster who’ll stop at nothing to get what she wants, until she meets the one thing she can’t get—Anna, a cute bartender, who fails to engage with Marina’s attempted manipulations via text after their one night stand. It’s a calamity that sends the already unhinged Marina even further off the rails as she sets her sights on winning Anna’s affections, completely oblivious to the way her obsession might be construed, her connection to Anna oddly mirroring the parasocial relationships Marina’s fans have with her, relationships the reader follows through the inclusion of fan forum threads throughout the narrative, which starts off nuts and only gets more and more wild. Beer pulls the whole thing off so perfectly, albeit very very darkly, and if you like that sort of thing, you’ll find this novel so delicious.
October 15, 2025
Property, by Kate Cayley
Property, the debut novel by the award-winner Cayley—who has previously published short fiction, poetry and plays—is set over a single day in west end Toronto, a contemporary riff on the Mrs. Dalloway arc with a little “Hurry up please it’s time” from “The Waste Land” thrown in for good measure, but it’s also unabashedly itself, rich and propulsive, the story of a neighbourhood and its motley crew of inhabitants including the rats scurrying around the very wet basement of a house under construction, and by the end of the day—we know from the start—somebody will be dead.
Property is the story of three mothers—Nat, a queer mother whose middle classness has crept up on her; Maddy, a former actress, who longs to escape her marriage; and the older woman across the street with her flickering curtain, one of the street’s long-time residents before people like Nat and Maddy moved in with their renos and lush strollers, who worries about her troubled adult son. It’s also the story of Ilya, Russian builder working on the excavated house, the lady smoking on the porch with her dog, Nat and Maddy’s children, and how not a single one of these characters’ inner lives is at all what the people around them imagine.
A novel about gentrification, community, secrets, fears and anxieties, about the unstable foundations at the base of so many of the stories we tell ourselves of who we are and what we’re becoming, Property, in all its delectable prose, fast becomes a heart-wrenching page-turner. The narrative culminates in an ending that manages to be inevitable, awful and perfect.
October 10, 2025
Sometimes Magic
A year ago today was a great day, because it was the day I met Suzy Krause when she came to town to do an event with Marissa Stapley at Type Books in the Junction. Suzy is a ridiculously talented author and downright radiant human who came all the way from Saskatchewan to promote her novel I Think We’ve Been Here Before, and I loved her immediately, and not JUST because she’s a blogger-turned-novelist just like I am and had had a copy of my debut novel on her shelf for years before we finally connected. And before the event, we all went out for dinner, along with the writer Sherri Vanderveen, and we talked about everything, including where I was at in my own career, with a novel on submission, no clue as to what was coming next, and I was trying to be more comfortable with having no expectations, with just living in the moment I was in.
That night after the event, as Suzy and I caught the subway east on the Bloor Danforth line, I FINALLY managed to catch the transit poster for Marissa’s then-new release, The Lightning Bottles, a book I love so much and which was kind of the novel Marissa has been working towards her whole career in terms of literary achievement. It was also exciting because I’ve dreamed of having a book on a transit ad, and having my friend’s book on a transit ad is the closest I’ve come. Because it never rains but it pours, we encountered the poster again on our way out of the station, and I think you can tell by the look on our faces just how excited and happy we were. And if all that weren’t magic enough, I received an email from my agent the next morning (while waiting for Suzy to come over for tea and scones—she was staying at a hotel was close to my house) that House of Anansi was going to make an offer on my book.
A year later, I am still trying to be more comfortable with having no expectations, just living in the moment I am in, which is easier to do in a world where I know good things happen sometimes. I just finished up the final pass for my new novel, now called DEFINITELY THRIVING. Marissa is reading it now from Los Angeles where she is busy at work on exciting things in preparation for the release of the Apple TV series based on her novel LUCKY. Suzy is reading it too from her home in Regina, where she’s spent the past year working on her own next book, and SUZY THINKS MY NOVEL IS GENUINELY FUNNY (Woot!).
The writing life is full of up and downs, and I’m realizing that there is actually no level of success that ensures an end to that. But in the meantime, there are magical people, friends to celebrate, and—in our own books, and real life—wonderful twists that can catch us unaware.
October 8, 2025
The Pugilist and the Sailor, by Nadia Ragbar
Imagine the impossible conundrum: a set of brothers, conjoined twins, and one’s entire existence is bound up in being a boxer, while the other just wants to read a story of a sailor all alone at sea. How do you reconcile that? A question that serves as jumping off point for Nadia Ragbar’s debut novel, The Pugilist and the Sailor, the story of the Reuben brothers, Bruce and Dougie, but which is also a meditation that draws into the narrative the boys’ loving parents, their neighbours, their co-workers, and a benevolent tailor determined to make the brothers a new suit. Ragbar’s story is a rich imagining of Bruce and Dougie’s physical experience—how they walk into a room, the way they sleep, how one brother hovers inside a door to give the other a bit of privacy to (maybe!) kiss a girl goodnight. And the boxing too, where the brothers are known as The Reuben Beat, two fists and three legs, a force to be reckoned with, except that Bruce doesn’t want to do it any longer, and Dougie has been having troubling neurological symptoms. Meanwhile, Bruce has been exchanging letters with a woman in the neighbourhood who has been overwhelmed by her own grief, but he hasn’t informed her yet of his physical situation, and the narrative encompasses her own point of view, and that of the brothers’ mother, Jane, who made her own choices when her sons were born, and might have to let go of her conviction that these were the best ones for them, that her sons were perfect as they were and they’d have to have the world bend to meet them rather than the other way around. Which has served them well, until now, and this is a story of holding on and letting go, and about the connections that persist in spite of unfathomable distances, a generous, human, and most moving read.
