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.
February 23, 2026
Frog and Other Essays, by Anne Fadiman
The day I first met my friend Nathalie was, in some ways, the day my life began, because it was also the day I discovered Anne Fadiman, when Nathalie gave me a copy of one of her essay collections—I think it was Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. And I very quickly became a devotee, devouring her other collection, and then the book on rereading which she’d edited, and ever since, Nathalie and I have been waiting for, craving, still more Anne Fadiman, her humour, her focus, her attention, her brilliance.
And then finally, Anne Fadiman delivered, with a new collection called Frog and Other Essays, which does not disappoint. If I designed the world, there would be stacks of copies at the entrance to every bookshop in the country and descending hoards on the verge of riot who want to buy them, but it turned out that our local Indigo had ordered in two. When I showed up at the store to purchase one, I texted Nathalie to let her know (she’d had no idea!) and before I’d even brought my copy to the till (I take a long time to browse, it’s true) Nathalie had come into the store and bought the copy remaining. (I’ve just checked their stock and there are two more on the shelf!).
What a thing to finally pick up a book that you’ve been waiting to read for more than 15 years—and Frog does not disappoint. Although the opening essay was unexpected—so many of Fadiman’s essays are the result of her close attention, and this one (about her children’s long-lived pet frog) was about a being to which she’d paid very little attention at all. (It made me laugh until I cried. “You may be wondering: What kind of frog was he? / I didn’t.”) Fadiman is so thoughtful, so intelligent, so creative, her thoughts so nimble, and so an essay about a mostly ignored frog (THAT LIVED FOR 17 YEARS!) is also a meditation on devotion (and otherwise), domestic life, care, family, and changes over time.
And then her essay on her printer. Her printer! “[A] Hewlett-Packard LaserJet Series II that cost $1,795” in 1987, and would live on for decades, Frankensteined together from spare parts mined on eBay. In “The Oakling and the Oak,” she writes about Coleridge’s disappointing son Hartley, and the nature of progeny, disappointing or otherwise. In “All My Pronouns,” she expounds on her evolving relationship with the rules of grammar, informed by her strict prescriptionist sensibility, but also from her relationship with her beloved students at Yale, where she is a Professor of English and teaches nonfiction writing. “Screen share” is a trip through Zoom learning in Spring 2020, what was lost, what was gained. The final line is, “At 5:20, I am reluctant to click the button that says, ‘End Meeting for All.'”
In “South Polar Times,” readers indulge Fadiman’s obsession with polar expeditions to much reward, this one about the newsletter produced by Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated polar expeditions. And then finally, “Yes to Everything!” about Fadiman’s student, Marina Keegan, a writer of great promise whose sudden death was shocking and whose work was published posthumously in the collection The Opposite of Loneliness.
Oh, I love the world through the eyes of Anne Fadiman. And I love Anne Fadiman, and I love Nathalie for giving me Anne Fadiman (among so many other riches). Like all the best thing, Fadiman’s work is never enough, but also it manages to be everything.
February 20, 2026
These are the Fireworks, by Vicki Grant
Oh, wow, this comedy murder mystery is one heck of a ride, full of twists and turns, moments of real poignancy, and abject absurdity. Celebrated YA and middle grade author Vicki Grant makes an assured debut for adult readers with These Are the Fireworks, a story about a family thrown into disarray after the death of its patriarch, but just not for the reasons you’d think. After the unexpected death of Nina Fforde’s father, Malcolm, her mother, Petra, begins acting bizarrely, dressing differently, hardly beset by grief at all, and possibly cavorting with a much-younger man. Nina herself decides to throw off her listless relationship, and move back home to help care for her mother—but Petra seems hardly concerned with being there for her grown daughters. Plus there’s a detective sniffing around suggesting that Malcolm’s death may not have been an accident. Come for the wacky story, but stay for the amazing family dynamics (including spectacular dialogue) between Nina and her two sisters. This one is great.
(This is one of four books featured in my latest “On Our Radar” column at 49thShelf. Check the whole thing out here!)
February 18, 2026
Black Public Joy, by Jay Pitter
“Every gesture, from ceding space on a sidewalk, to nodding your head to bombastic beats radiating from a street festival, influences the amount and quality of public joy available to ourselves and others. Every bus ride, trip to the bookstore, and coffee shop meetup presents us with the responsibility to be good stewards of each other’s public joy.” —Jay Pitter
In her work, Jay Pitter takes the familiar and makes it new, complicating narratives in the most generative, engaging and interesting ways to create new possibilities. And in her new book, BLACK PUBLIC JOY, she continues that work, exploring the myriad expressions of Black identity in public spaces, and how those expressions are connected to history and culture. The book begins with a childhood memory of Pitter dancing to music she hears while walking through a shopping mall, and being reprimanded by her mother “who felt that a Black person dancing in public was undignified and reinforced racist stereotypes.” And over the years, the experience would contribute to Pitter’s approach as a placemaker (someone who leads the design, policy and programming of public spaces) and urban planning professor. She writes, “I’m fascinated by how people claim and cede space in public and how design, histories, stories, politics, and social attitudes impact these choices.”
BLACK PUBLIC JOY explores all these ideas through five different topics: performance, restriction, protest, sacred space, and joy, drawing on examples from cities across North America. It’s a beautiful and galvanizing text, shifting my own perspective about public space, and making me consider the ways in which I too can be a steward of public joy for those around me.
February 11, 2026
The Barn, by Wright Thompson
After hearing Wright Thompson—a white sportswriter from Mississippi—on The Bulwark Podcast, I absolutely had to get my hands on his book The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi, which is on one level about the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a 14 year old Black boy lynched after apparently whistling at a white woman that summer when he was down south visiting his cousins. But which is also about America all told through the history of a thirty-six square mile area in the Mississipi Delta that was—not randomly in the slightest, but instead as a result of its land, its people, its politics, its history, its mythology—where Emmett Till (a child whose family called him Bobo, one of the silly nicknames I’ve given my own children) was murdered in a barn in earshot of plenty of people who did nothing to help. A barn that still stands today, where the property owner stores his Christmas decorations, and he had no idea that Till had been killed there. So many people in the Mississippi—Thompson among them for a very long time, whose family had been farming on nearby land since 1913—never knew the story of Emmett Till at all, and Thompson points out the strangeness of a culture build on remembrance managing to forget so very much.
Thompson never mentions the song in his book, but I’ll never hear Arlo Guthrie singing about the rhythm of the rails ever again without thinking about how Emmett Till rode the Illinois Central line that summer, The City of New Orleans, and came back home the same way in a casket that his mother insisted remain open at his funeral so that everyone could see what the murderers had done to her child. Emmett Till was America’s native son, a product of a terrible and violent history that endures to this day and whose patterns continue with state-sanctioned violence in Minnesota and an establishment that will stop at nothing to maintain their place in a hateful caste system. (He was more than a symbol though, he was also a boy, Mamie Till-Mobley’s son, and Wheeler Parker’s cousin, and his family has worked to keep the memory of his life and the tragedy of his death alive, to make it all mean something.)
There is no then and now in Thompson’s storytelling, instead everything happening at once, layers upon layers of meaning and time, Thompson peeling back the layers to let light shine into the darkness. This is one of the most beautiful, powerful and heartbreaking books I’ve ever read, galvanizing and absolutely necessary.
February 10, 2026
In Winter I Get Up at Night, by Jane Urquhart
Jane Urquhart’s In Winter I Get Up at Night is plotted more like an epic mural than a straightforward novel. Instead of straightforward chronology, time is a tangle, the past ever present, memory heaped on memory, some of it imagined, some of it otherwise, the line between fact and fiction blurred, mythical figures appearing as men, other men as myth (maybe). As Emer drives down snowy roads in Saskatchewan, on her way to work as an itinerant music teacher at rural schools, she recalls the story of her one great love, and their illicit evenings together at railway hotels. She also thinks about her family’s journey from Ontario to the Prairies, the great storm that unsettled their settling there, and the months she spent as a patient in a children’s ward in the hospital recovering from catastrophic injuries. In some ways, this is a quiet novel, a subtle novel, but only if one is not reading very carefully, skimming over the clearing of Indigenous peoples from the plains, the presence of the KKK in prairie communities, the xenophobia that gets in everywhere. Symbols of Canadiana woven into the tapestry—the railway, its castle-like hotels, Frederick Banting, Pullman porters in all their gallantry, a powerful invitation to look again and consider what the true stories of this country actually are.
February 9, 2026
A Love Affair With the Unknown, by Gillian Deacon
“Unfathomable life is the reality, yes. With a deep breath to calm ourselves, we can concede that uncertainty is inevitable and part of being alive. In fact, we turn toward it; we need the rich mystery of life’s unknowableness. We understand, deep down, that a life that went entirely to plan would be joyless.”
It has taken me a long time, many missteps, four years of therapy, and a pile of books by Pema Chodran to learn to be somewhat not un-okay with uncertainty. A love affair I would definitely not term it yet, but I’ve come a very long way since a decade ago when Twitter was breaking my brain and I was continually refreshing my feed anyway in the hopes that this next update that would make sense of the chaos unfolding and offer some indication that everything, at some point, would turn out okay. Since six years ago as we were heading into a pandemic and I felt I was single-highhandedly responsible for holding the world together. Since four years ago when I walked up Major Street weeping, because a new strain of Covid was about to arrive and I was incapable of imagining anything less than an apocalypse. In my mind, there was what I could control and abject disaster, and nothing in between.
But oh, there is space, so much space, for wonder and possibility, for strength and resilience, for care and community, and—in Gillian Deacon’s extraordinary case—a book like this one, which is such a gift to its readers. A Love Affair With the Unknown is a compelling blend of memoir and reportage about dwelling in uncertainty as Deacon—a popular Toronto broadcaster—finds herself beset by a debilitating and mysterious illness in late 2022. Having previously come through three bouts of cancer, and as someone who works on live radio, Deacon was more familiar than most are with uncertainty, but this new twist in her story was particularly challenging—she could no longer partake in the activities that gave her pleasure, she felt terrible all the time (nausea, fatigue, tinnitus, chills, and more), and worst of all, she had no assurance whatsoever that things were ever going to change, that the rest of her life wasn’t going to be a tiny world defined and confined by illness.
Deacon eventually receives a diagnosis of Long Covid, but this book isn’t about the happily-ever-after (Deacon knows by now there’s no promise of that), instead the uncomfortable in-between when she still didn’t know how it all might shake out. It’s an exploration of the psychology behind our discomfort with uncertainty, the way that too many of us would prefer to skip through the hard stuff and get to the end—Deacon writes about how she used to think she was embracing the maxim to “Feel the fear and do it anyway,” but she was actually jumping past the fear part so she didn’t have to feel it at all. She writes about how difficult it is to be lost, to lose control, but what we miss when we refuse to let go, the amazing possibilities for how fate may unfold. That the greatest fear of all is often that we might not have the capacity to get through challenges, more so than the challenges themselves (it’s a fine distinction, but it matters).
Deacon considers how Salmon Rushdie faced his fears, references Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, explains attention bias, recommends awe, thinks about art and unpredictability. She notes how the Covid pandemic thew so many of us off the rails (it’s me!), leaving us less equipped to meet this current moment and all its tumult. There’s also the anxieties that aren’t simply all in our head—the reality of climate change especially, fears that are justified, an unknown that holds no promises of everything working out just fine. She also writes about chance and risk and poker (!), about arrogance and humility. About hope. About “figuring out how to stay emotionally afloat in a tsunami of change.”
The crux of it all, for me, has been learning to stay where we are. Not leaping into a terrifying future, not desperately clinging to a past that is gone, but instead being here and paying attention. And A Love Affair With the Unknown is a guidebook to just that, a beautiful, kind, calming and bolstering read, and a book I’ll keep returning to (along with all the Pemas).
February 3, 2026
Is This a Cry for Help?, by Emily Austin
Bestseller Emily Austin returns with another compelling novel about a lovable weirdo beset by mental health struggles and the burden of trying to exist as a sensitive human in an uncertain, inexplicable and at times cruel world. IS THIS A CRY FOR HELP? is the story of first person narrator Darcy, who loves her wife, and her career, and who has just gone back to work after a mental health crisis brought on by the death of her ex-boyfriend. But any chance of a smooth return to work is stymied by a campaign against the public library where Darcy works as a librarian by a group of right-wing zealots all riled up by the spectre of the public library as a den of iniquity.
In a dry, wry and understated tone, Darcy brings the reader along on her journey to make sense of this nonsense, and also to try to keep being okay in the midst of absurdity and crisis. We’re privy to her conversations with her therapist, discussions with her wife, and the day-to-day minutiae of life in a public library which serves to underscore the polycrisis of our current moment, homelessness, mental health, poverty, loneliness, polarization, misinformation and so much more converging.
There’s a light touch to all this heaviness, as well as humour, but also a powerful message underlying the story about the importance of libraries, learning, curiosity and understanding in a world that feels increasingly hostile, where so many of us are being pitted against each other. Calmly, and beautifully, through Darcy’s story, Austin suggests that connection is not only possible, but that it’s the only way through.
