Bookspo Kerry Clare

Oh, wow, get ready for Adrienne Gruber’s amazing conversation about her fourth book, which is also her first essay collection, MONSTERS, MARTYRS AND MARIONETTES: ESSAYS ABOUT MOTHERHOOD, and the numerous threads that connect it to Sarah Manguso’s memoir ONGOINGNESS: THE END OF A DIARY.
We talk about Gruber’s movement from poetry to prose, about the expansiveness of Manguso’s memoir, the lack of expansiveness in motherhood in general, how both books talk about the postpartum haze, how parenthood does wild things with the concept of linear time, the surrealness of Gruber’s pandemic pregnancy, the gift of knowing you want children, what kinds of experiences need to be lived before than can be imagined, and so much more. I hope you enjoy this one as much as I did.
Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes is a revelatory collection of personal essays that subverts the stereotypes and transcends the platitudes of family life to examine motherhood with blistering insight.
Documenting the birth and early life of her three daughters, Adrienne Gruber shares what it really means to use one’s body to bring another life into the world and the lasting ramifications of that act on both parent and child. Each piece peers into the seemingly mundane to show us the mortal and emotional consequences of maternal bonds, placing experiences of “being a mom” within broader contexts—historical, literary, biological, and psychological—to speak to the ugly realities of parenthood often omitted from mainstream conversations.
Ultimately, these deeply moving, graceful essays force us to consider how close we are to death, even in the most average of moments, and how beauty is a necessary celebration amidst the chaos of being alive.
ADRIENNE GRUBER is an award-winning writer originally from Saskatoon. She is the author of five chapbooks, three books of poetry, including Q & A, Buoyancy Control, and This is the Nightmare, and the creative nonfiction collection, Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes: Essays on Motherhood. She won the 2015 Antigonish Review’s Great Blue Heron poetry contest, SubTerrain’s 2017 Lush Triumphant poetry contest, placed third in Event’s 2020 creative non-fiction contest, and was the runner up in SubTerrain’s 2023 creative non-fiction contest. Both her poetry and non-fiction has been longlisted for the CBC Literary Awards. In 2012, Mimic was awarded the bp Nichol Chapbook Award. Adrienne lives with her partner and their three daughters on Nex̱wlélex̱m (Bowen Island), B.C., the traditional territory of the Coast Salish peoples.


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Okay, buckle up for this one. Robin Lefler’s sophmore novel NOT HOW I PICTURED IT is the shipwreck rom-com you’ve been waiting for, a pitch perfect DREAM of a book whose wacky premise brings some real heft to the table. And I’m so happy to be able to talk to her about NINE PERFECT STRANGERS, by Lianne Moriarty, the novel about a group of people isolated together at a wellness centre that inspired Lefler as she shaped her own book.
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Listen as Robin talks about what she loves about Moriarty’s hybridity, the challenges of writing a locked room mystery, how annoying it was to have to keep track of her characters’ food rations, the real island with an actual castle that inspired the setting for her story, the surprising thing she learned about creating a plot outline (spoiler: it works!), and why it was important to her to write about characters who are still becoming themselves in their 40s.
About NOT HOW I PICTURED IT:
The OC meets The Unhoneymooners in this shipwreck romcom when the reunited cast of a hit show get stuck on a deserted island with nothing but their complete lack of survival skills, simmering drama, and the sneaking suspicion that someone is up to no good.
Agnes “Ness” Larkin has been out of the spotlight for twenty years since her quick departure from a starring role in a hit teen TV drama. When the show is tapped for a reboot, no one is more surprised than Ness that she signs on to rejoin the cast, leaving behind a normal—if not exactly thrilling—life in Toronto. Also back for round two are Libby, Ness’s former best friend and soon to be makeup empire magnate, and Hayes, Ness’s one-that-got-away who has risen to A-list fame (and somehow gotten even better looking) in the years she’s been gone.
When they set off for filming near the Bahamas, a storm leaves the seven actors and one production assistant stranded on a small island with only an abandoned, derelict mansion to wait out the storm. But when the weather clears and a new day rises—their boat is gone too.
Stuck in a bizarre, crumbling house on an uninhabited island with possibly the most useless survival group in history, Ness and her co-stars are forced to revisit a minefield of past transgressions and come to terms with the adults they’ve become as they work together to ride out the storm. Or at least pretend to—they are actors, after all.
Interspersed with weather reports, fictional memoir excerpts, a dating profile and Perez-Hilton-esque blog posts, Not How I Pictured It is a rollicking novel of delightful absurdity, pithy dialogue, and no shortage of heart.
ROBIN LEFLER grew up near Toronto and (briefly) pursued an ill-fated career in equine massage therapy before stumbling into the world of robotics and tech sales. Not How I Pictured It is her second novel. Her first, Reasonable Adults, was published in 2022. Robin Lefler still lives in her hometown with her family and two very needy canines.


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Today I’m thrilled to be bringing you my conversation with award-winning writer Leslie Shimotakahara about her new novel SISTERS OF THE SPRUCE, set during World War One in Haida Gwaii (then known as the Queen Charlotte Islands) and loosely inspired by her grandmother’s experiences, and how the spirit of Charlotte Bronte’s classic JANE EYRE both infuses the novel’s atmosphere and also helped inspire its protagonist.
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Leslie tells me about her long history as an avid reader, the story behind her memoir THE READING LIST (in which a wayward academic learns to love reading for pleasure again), how she first came upon JANE EYRE, what it felt like to encounter the novel again years later, and I also mention the fascinating bit of historical detail in SISTER OF THE SPRUCE that blew my mind!
About SISTERS OF THE SPRUCE:
World War One is in high gear. Fourteen-year-old Khya Terada moves with her family to a remote, misty inlet on Haida Gwaii, then the Queen Charlotte Islands, in northern British Columbia, known for its Sitka spruces. The Canadian government has passed an act to expedite logging of these majestic trees, desperately needed for the Allies’ aircrafts in Europe. At a camp on the inlet, Khya’s father, Sannosuke—a talented, daring logger with twenty years of experience since immigrating from Japan—assumes a position of leadership among the Japanese and Chinese workers.
But the arrival of a group of white loggers, eager to assert their authority, throws off balance the precarious life that Khya and her family have begun to establish. When a quarrel between Sannosuke and a white man known as “the Captain” escalates, leading to the betrayal of her older sister, Izzy, and humiliation for the family, Khya embarks on a perilous journey with her one friend—a half-Chinese sex worker, on the lam for her own reasons—to track down the man and force him to take responsibility. Yet nothing in the forest is as it appears. Can they save Izzy from ruination and find justice without condemning her to a life of danger, or exposing themselves to the violence of an angry, power-hungry man?
Drawing on inspiration from her ancestors’ stories and experiences, Shimotakahara weaves an entrancing tale of female adventure, friendship, and survival.
Leslie Shimotakahara's memoir, The Reading List, won the Canada-Japan Literary Prize, and her fiction has been shortlisted for the KM Hunter Artist Award. She has written two critically acclaimed novels, After the Bloom and Red Oblivion. After the Bloom received a starred review from Booklist and is Bustle’s number one choice in “50 Books To Read With Your Book Club,” while Kirkus Review praised Red Oblivion for displaying “virtuosity in this subtle deconstruction of one family’s tainted origins.” Her writing has appeared in the National Post, World Literature Today, and Changing the Face of Canadian Literature, among other anthologies and periodicals. She completed a PhD in English at Brown University. She and her husband live in Toronto’s west end.


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What a delight to bring you this conversation with Emily Austin about her beautiful and hilarious new novel INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT SPACE, how some interesting feedback on her first novel inspired her to deepen her own understanding of love, and how ideas from bell hooks’ ALL ABOUT LOVE found their way into her fiction.
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Emily talks about her tendency to write her way through problems she’s trying to solve, how she’d never written about love before her debut fiction, why the protagonist in her new book is afraid to be loved, and we talk about the vulnerability required on the part of both reader and writer for a true reading connection to be possible.
About INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT SPACE:
A fast-paced, hilarious, and ultimately hopeful novel for anyone who has ever worried they might be a terrible person—from the bestselling author of Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead.
Enid is obsessed with space. She can tell you all about black holes and their ability to spaghettify you without batting an eye in fear. Her one major phobia? Bald men. But she tries to keep that one under wraps. When she’s not listening to her favorite true crime podcasts on a loop, she’s serially dating a rotation of women from dating apps. At the same time, she’s trying to forge a new relationship with her estranged half-sisters after the death of her absent father. When she unwittingly plunges into her first serious romantic entanglement, Enid starts to believe that someone is following her.
As her paranoia spirals out of control, Enid must contend with her mounting suspicion that something is seriously wrong with her. Because at the end of the day there’s only one person she can’t outrun—herself.
Brimming with quirky humor, charm, and heart, Interesting Facts about Space effortlessly shows us the power of revealing our secret shames, the most beautifully human parts of us all.
EMILY AUSTIN is the author of Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, Interesting Facts about Space, and the poetry collection Gay Girl Prayers. She was born in Ontario, Canada, and received two writing grants from the Canadian Council for the Arts. She studied English literature and library science at Western University. She currently lives in Ottawa, in the territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation.


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This week I’m talking with Waubgeshig Rice about his new novel MOON OF THE TURNING LEAVES, which came out in Canada last fall and was just published in the United States, and how he was inspired by Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 novel BLOOD MERIDIAN to craft a narrative in which the land guides the story.
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Waub talks about why he thinks BLOOD MERIDIAN is a post-apocalyptic novel, what he thinks of McCarthy’s representation of Indigenous characters, what he’s most proud of having accomplished in his latest book, and how Emily St. John Mandel’s STATION ELEVEN helped inspire him too. Miigwech to Waub for this excellent conversation!
About MOON OF THE TURNING LEAVES:
In the years since a mysterious cataclysm caused a permanent blackout that toppled infrastructure and thrust the world into anarchy, Evan Whitesky has led his community in remote northern Canada off the rez and into the bush, where they’ve been rekindling their Anishinaabe traditions, isolated from the outside world. As new generations are born, and others come of age in a world after everything, Evan’s people are stronger than ever. But resources around their new settlement are drying up, and elders warn that they cannot stay indefinitely.
Evan and his teenaged daughter, Nangohns, are chosen to lead a scouting party on a months-long trip down to their traditional home on the shores of Lake Huron—to seek new beginnings, and discover what kind of life—and what danger—still exists in the lands to the south.
Waubgeshig Rice’s exhilarating return to the world first explored in Moon of the Crusted Snow is a brooding story of survival, resilience, Indigenous identity, and rebirth.
WAUBGESHIG RICE grew up in Wasauksing First Nation on the shores of Georgian Bay, in the southeast of Robinson-Huron Treaty territory. He’s a writer, listener, speaker, language learner, and a martial artist, holding a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. He is the author of the short story collection Midnight Sweatlodge (2011), and the novels Legacy (2014) and Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018). He appreciates loud music and the four seasons. He lives in N’Swakamok—also known as Sudbury, Ontario—with his wife and three sons.


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This time I’m talking with Ashley Tate, bestselling debut author of TWENTY-SEVEN MINUTES, about how reading Iain Reid’s smash hit novel I’M THINKING OF ENDINGS gave her permission to write the blendy psychological thriller-literary mash-up of her dreams (or worst nightmares?).
In our conversation, Ashley talks about stumbling upon Reid’s debut novel without any idea of what she was getting into, how the novel gave her permission to write the kind of book she wants to read, about leaping over the bounds and limits of genre, how for her it always starts with character, the ways in which an ordinary setting can be absolutely creepy with the right tension, and why it makes sense that a story about grief is so destabilizing.
About TWENTY SEVEN MINUTES:
Welcome to West Wilmer.
Where everyone knows everyone.
And where everyone has a secret.
THE QUESTION No one in the small, claustrophobic town of West Wilmer can forget Phoebe Dean, their sweet, beloved golden girl. It’s been ten years since the car crash that tragically took her life, yet one question lingers: Why did it take her brother, Grant, twenty-seven minutes to call for help after the accident?
THE SECRET As the anniversary of Phoebe’s death approaches, Grant is consumed by memories of that night and everything he lost: his future, his reputation, his little sister. And the secret he’s been keeping all these years is threatening to undo him. But he and Phoebe weren’t the only ones in the car that night. Becca was there, too, and she’ll do anything to protect Grant.
THE TRUTH Everyone in West Wilmer remembers Phoebe, but only June Delroy remembers the other person lost that same night. Her brother, Wyatt, disappeared ten years ago, without a trace.
Until someone appears at her door.
Someone who may know where Wyatt went all those years ago.
Someone who knows what really happened that night.
Someone who is ready to tell the truth.
Taking place over three days and culminating in a shocking twist that will leave you breathless, Twenty-Seven Minutes is a gripping story about what happens when grief becomes unbearable, dark secrets are unearthed, and the horrifying truth is revealed.
ASHLEY TATE worked for over a decade as a writer and an editor for various publications as well as Canada’s first online magazine. Twenty-Seven Minutes is her debut. She lives with her husband, their two children, and their dog in Toronto.


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