Purchase THE LONGEST NIGHT from your local indie bookstore https://www.indiebookstores.ca/book/9781990601958/

My book, Definitely Thriving:

from your local bookshop: https://www.indiebookstores.ca/book/9781487013936/

from Indigo: https://www.indigo.ca/en-ca/definitely-thriving-a-novel/9781487013936.html

From Amazon: https://www.amazon.ca/Definitely-Thriving-Novel-Kerry-Clare/dp/1487013930/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3PMJJOC69JHZB&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.sWVQ1qYuWFqbCC5wQ_wmq83Vs_0GBgBAU4OyxgCCvCzGjHj071QN20LucGBJIEps.dHIYmVKXdn-7EtZX4YSrjNwqv79bgsH5GbliB5folaI&dib_tag=se&keywords=definitely+thriving&qid=1767376359&sprefix=definitely+thriving%2Caps%2C117&sr=8-1

From Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/definitely-thriving-kerry-clare/1147425682?ean=9781487013936

About The Longest Night:

A taut and uncanny thriller about one girl’s search for home, melding time travel, magic realism, horror, and literary suspense.

One forty-below December night, 18-year-old Ash Hayes finds herself locked out of her family home in rural Minnesota. She seeks shelter from the freezing cold and certain death at the closest house on the road, with neighbours she hasn’t yet met.

The next morning, everything is off-kilter – the neighbours’ house has no mirrors or modern technology, and all the windows blocked. When Ash tries to call her parents, their numbers are disconnected. One of the strange inhabitants there is a doctor, who offers Ash a terrible form of help and won’t take no for an answer. In her efforts to get out of the house and back to her regular life, though, Ash finds herself transported to an even stranger place and time, setting off a chain of events that connect with (and alter) her past and her future.

For fans of Mona Awad and Emily St. John Mandel, The Longest Night is a high-stakes, genre-twisting story about searching for something stable in a world where reality is ever-changing and can’t be trusted.

Lauren Carter is the author of six books including her latest novel, The Longest Night, which has been described as “mind-bending, psychologically disturbing, and utterly captivating.” Her second novel, This Has Nothing To Do With You, won the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction from the Manitoba Books Awards while her short story collection Places Like These was a finalist for the 2023 INDIES Book of the Year Award. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and brings her passion for writing, adventure, and community to events organized through her business Wild Ground Writing Retreats.

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Purchase GOD GUYS from your local indie bookstore https://www.indiebookstores.ca/book/9780771005237/

My book, Definitely Thriving:

from your local bookshop: https://www.indiebookstores.ca/book/9781487013936/

from Indigo: https://www.indigo.ca/en-ca/definitely-thriving-a-novel/9781487013936.html

From Amazon: https://www.amazon.ca/Definitely-Thriving-Novel-Kerry-Clare/dp/1487013930/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3PMJJOC69JHZB&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.sWVQ1qYuWFqbCC5wQ_wmq83Vs_0GBgBAU4OyxgCCvCzGjHj071QN20LucGBJIEps.dHIYmVKXdn-7EtZX4YSrjNwqv79bgsH5GbliB5folaI&dib_tag=se&keywords=definitely+thriving&qid=1767376359&sprefix=definitely+thriving%2Caps%2C117&sr=8-1

From Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/definitely-thriving-kerry-clare/1147425682?ean=9781487013936

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kerryreads.substack.com/subscribe

Purchase 6:40 to Montreal from your local indie bookstore https://www.indiebookstores.ca/book/9781552455074/

Read Eva Jurczyk's essay "My character, my cancer and how my art reflects my life" https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/first-person/article-my-character-my-cancer-and-how-my-art-reflects-my-life/

My book, Definitely Thriving:

from your local bookshop: https://www.indiebookstores.ca/book/9781487013936/

from Indigo: https://www.indigo.ca/en-ca/definitely-thriving-a-novel/9781487013936.html

From Amazon: https://www.amazon.ca/Definitely-Thriving-Novel-Kerry-Clare/dp/1487013930/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3PMJJOC69JHZB&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.sWVQ1qYuWFqbCC5wQ_wmq83Vs_0GBgBAU4OyxgCCvCzGjHj071QN20LucGBJIEps.dHIYmVKXdn-7EtZX4YSrjNwqv79bgsH5GbliB5folaI&dib_tag=se&keywords=definitely+thriving&qid=1767376359&sprefix=definitely+thriving%2Caps%2C117&sr=8-1

From Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/definitely-thriving-kerry-clare/1147425682?ean=9781487013936

Eva Jurczyk is amazing, the kind of person with whom conversation can leap from references to Swahili pulp fiction to one of the most hyped thrillers of all time (but made fresh again). Her new novel, 6:40 to Montreal, is a USA Today bestseller, a monthly mystery pick from Barnes & Noble, just as bloody and deranged as her previous thriller, That Night in the Library, but with an achingly human narrative thread that has the whole novel throbbing with love and meaning.

Pickle Me This is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

We talked about her novel’s debt to Agatha Christie and Murder on the Orient Expression, and also about what Jurcyk herself has learned about the writer’s craft from Christie, plus how her work as a librarian has influenced her as a reader and a writer. And then we turn to Gillian Flynn’s runaway bestseller, a book whose greatness and ingenuity is easy to forget in light of all the hype that came to surround it. Finally, Jurczyk continues to hold the line on her take that Blundstones are wholly inappropriate for Canadian winters.

This was so much fun, and I hope you like it too!

About 6:40 TO MONTREAL:

From international bestselling author Eva Jurczyk, 6:40 TO MONTREAL is a claustrophobic, deceivingly bloody thriller that follows Agatha as she uses one day on the famous six-hour morning train from Toronto to Montreal as a mini writing retreat to finish her novel. No WiFi, no distractions. And no way out...

Agatha’s husband has bought her a first-class ticket on the scenic six-hour train from Toronto to Montreal as a gift - a one-day writing retreat so she can get some serious work done on her new book, a highly-anticipated follow-up to Agatha’s runaway bestseller debut novel. The first-class car is the perfect place to be productive, with only a handful of other passengers, plenty of snacks and drinks, and beautiful views flying by outside the window.

But Agatha has other plans for her day out. . . plans that are unexpectedly derailed when the train breaks down in the middle of the frigid Canadian woods and one of Agatha’s fellow passengers dies quietly in his seat. Soon, a pleasant morning in transit turns into a fight for survival against an unknown and unseen enemy. Will Agatha--or any of the passengers--make it out alive?

Eva Jurczyk was born in a mining town in Poland and wound up halfway around the world in a Canadian city that often masquerades as New York in the movies. As her day job, she buys books, building library collections for the University of Toronto Libraries. She travels to Paris whenever the wind is good but currently lives with her husband, son, and collections of books in Toronto, Canada.

Pre-order my new novel, Definitely Thriving, coming March 17 from House of Anansi Press

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kerryreads.substack.com/subscribe

Purchase Property from your local indie bookstore https://www.indiebookstores.ca/book/9781552455074/

My book, Definitely Thriving:

from your local bookshop: https://www.indiebookstores.ca/book/9781487013936/

from Indigo: https://www.indigo.ca/en-ca/definitely-thriving-a-novel/9781487013936.html

From Amazon: https://www.amazon.ca/Definitely-Thriving-Novel-Kerry-Clare/dp/1487013930/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3PMJJOC69JHZB&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.sWVQ1qYuWFqbCC5wQ_wmq83Vs_0GBgBAU4OyxgCCvCzGjHj071QN20LucGBJIEps.dHIYmVKXdn-7EtZX4YSrjNwqv79bgsH5GbliB5folaI&dib_tag=se&keywords=definitely+thriving&qid=1767376359&sprefix=definitely+thriving%2Caps%2C117&sr=8-1

From Barnes & Nobel: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/definitely-thriving-kerry-clare/1147425682?ean=9781487013936

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kerryreads.substack.com/subscribe

I can’t think of a better way to close out BOOKSPO Season 3 than with a visit with novelist and literary podcast queen, Bianca Marais, whose new novel, A MOST PUZZLING MURDER, is a book she wrote to prove that it was possible to write a locked room mystery by the seat of one’s pants. Possible, which isn’t to say that it was EASY, and Marais made her task even more complicated by packing her novel with puzzles and riddles, and even a CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE element!

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In our conversation, Marais talks about wanting to bring her readers deep into the narrative, and have them scribbling in the margins to crack the code. We talk about how writing a novel is like a puzzle anyway, and how she keeps breaking out of the confines of genre and marketing to write a different kind of book every time. And it’s true that A MOST PUZZLING MURDER is something different altogether (complete with raccoons!)—but that those beloved CHOOSE YOUR ADVENTURE novels from our childhood were an inspiration for sure!

How do you solve a murder that hasn't happened yet?Destiny Whip is a former child prodigy, world-renowned enigmatologist and very, very alone. A life filled with loss has made her a recluse, an existence she's content to endure until a letter arrives inviting her to interview for the position of Scruffmore family historian. Not only does an internet search for the name yield almost nothing, it's a role she never applied to in the first place!After she decodes the invitation's hidden message with ease, the promise of her family secrets being revealed is too powerful a draw for the orphaned Destiny, who soon finds herself on Eerie Island. It's a place whose inhabitants are almost as inhospitable as the tempestuous weather. The Scruffmores themselves turn out to be not much better, a snarled mess of secrets and motives connected by their mistrust for one another.Their newly arrived guest proves to be just as much an enigma to them as they are to her. While Destiny slowly works to unravel the mysteries hidden throughout the ominous castle, she struggles to interpret disturbing nightly visions of what is to come. In the midst of cryptic ciphers, hidden passages, and the family's magical heritage and line of succession, Destiny is certain of two things: one of the Scruffmores is going to die and she's running out of time to stop it.Interspersed with riddles and puzzles that both Destiny and the reader must solve, A Most Puzzling Murder is a one-of-a-kind mystery that will leave you guessing and gasping until the very last page!

Bianca Marais is the author of the bestselling The Witches of Moonshyne Manor,as well as the beloved Hum If You Don't Know the Words and If You Want to Make God Laugh, and the Audible Original, The Prynne Viper. Her latest novel, A Most Puzzling Murder, was released on the 10th of June 2025 She taught at the University of Toronto's School of Continuing Studies where she was awarded an Excellence in Teaching Award for Creative Writing.She is the co-host of the popular podcast, The S**t No One Tells You About Writing,which is aimed at helping emerging writers become published.

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The propulsive read of the summer is here with Heather Birrell’s novel, BORN, a novel whose premise is the question: What happens when an English teacher goes into labour during a Toronto high school lockdown? And everything that happens next is probably different from what you might expect from a polyphonic novel that is a life-affirming testament to community, care, and the social miracle that is the public school, informed by the award-winning writer Birrell’s own experience as a teacher in Toronto.

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In our conversation, Birrell and I go back to the start, to where we connected years ago as new mothers, soon becoming friends. And all these years later, it feels full-circle to be talking about a novel about labour and birth. And Birrell explains how BORN is about labour in other ways too, that it’s an ode to caretakers, to the undervalued work in our society that’s usual performed by women, and she tells me about the creative connections between BORN and George Saunders’ LINCOLN IN THE BARDO, another novel by someone best known for their short stories, and another that takes place in a liminal space outside the bounds of life.

What happens when an English teacher goes into labour during a Toronto high school lockdown?

High school English teacher Elise loves teaching Shakespeare. She is also very pregnant. She’s trapped in a classroom with her Grade 12 students during a lockdown. Anthony, the cause of the lockdown, is roaming the halls with a knife in search of some solace, consumed by thoughts of his best friend Samantha, who is in peril. Maria, the school's counselor, is second-guessing her decision to turn him in.

As the lockdown drags on, Elise can no longer deny that she’s going into labour. And she’ll have to rely on the students to get her through: Shai-Anna and Faduma end up acting as midwives, and the others do what they can.

In the same way the self shatters and sharpens when one is doing the hard work of giving birth, so does the narrative of the novel, with various people in the school picking up the threads of the story.

With infinite empathy for all involved, Born explores the myriad pitfalls and utopian possibilities of the school system, motherhood, and caregiving, and the sometimes fraught, sometimes transcendent nature of the student-teacher relationship.

Heather Birrell is the author of the novel Born, a poetry collection, Float and Scurry and two story collections, Mad Hope and I know you are but what am I?. As well as the mechanisms and mysteries of individual consciousness, Heather’s writing is concerned with how we give care and exist in community. Her work has been honoured with the Gerald Lampert Award for poetry, the Journey Prize for short fiction and the Edna Staebler Award for non-fiction. She has been shortlisted for both National and Western Magazine Awards and Arc Magazine’s Poem of the Year Award. Her poem “Wind” was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2022. Her stories, essays, and poems have appeared in many North American journals and anthologies, including The New Quarterly, Toronto Noir, Descant, pinhole poetry, and The Malahat Review. Heather works as a high school teacher and creative writing instructor. She has spent extended periods in the Kingdom of Fife and the Isle of Lewis in Scotland but now lives in her hometown of Toronto with her mother, her husband, and their two daughters.

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Teri Vlassopoulos is back, following up her celebrated novel ESCAPE PLANS with LIVING EXPENSES, a novel about sisterhood, family, infertility, and more. Vlassopoulos talks to me about the story changed over the years that she was working it, and how she took inspiration from books like Amy Fusselman’s THE PHARMACIST’S MATE, which weave the experience of infertility into the wider context of life itself, as just one piece of a larger puzzle, whose other pieces include Sea Shanties, an AC/DC concert, and more, all within the space of about 100 pages.

Teri talks to me about how novel it was to encounter Fusselman’s memoir about infertility more than two decades ago, and about how that story resonated with her long before she’d have her own experiences with infertility. We also talked about Laurie Colwin (of course!), her wonderfully oddly plotted novels about ordinary people, about how food writing found its way into LIVING EXPENSES, and what’s tricky about fitting an infertility narrative into the container of fiction.

As the children to a single mother who immigrated from the Philippines, Laura and Claire have always been exceptionally close. Told from the perspective of Laura, Living Expenses is about a point of divergence in the sisters' lives: Claire has moved to San Francisco for a startup job in Silicon Valley while Laura and her husband, Joe, remain in Toronto and decide to start a family. Laura quickly encounters issues and begins the slow process of fertility treatments. Meanwhile, Claire gets involved in a venture that taps into the fertility industry. Living Expenses interrogates the strain that can accompany even the strongest of relationships, and captures the inevitable creep of technology into all facets of its characters' lives, from communication to reproduction.

Teri Vlassopoulos has published three books, a collection of short stories, Bats or Swallows, which was nominated for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, and the novels, Escape Plans and Living Expenses. Her fiction and non-fiction has been published in Room Magazine, Catapult, The Millions, The Rumpus, The Quarantine Review, Open Book, and more. She also publishes a regular Substack newsletter, Bibliographic. She lives in Toronto.

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Today’s BOOKSPO ventures beyond the human as I talk to Catherine Bush about her sixth book, which is also her first short story collection, SKIN. She tells me about how she, like many writers, began writing short fiction, but soon realized that the novel was the container for the stories she was telling, and would focus on novel-writing for years…until an interest in flash fiction brought her back to short stories. SKIN includes some of those flash fictions, as well as longer pieces, stories she’s written recently and other reworkings of stories she’d written in the past, the result a collection that’s rich and eclectic (in terms of form and approach), but with fascinatingly recurring touchpoints, which reflect Bush’s preoccupations as a thinker and an author over the years.

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And her BOOKSPO pick is Ali Smith’s COMPANION PIECE, a book that inspired Bush for the ways in which it seems to be fiction pushing right up against our present moment, with both humour and urgency at once. She talks about the sense of play in the book, which is a sense that infuses her own stories in SKIN. And about how she admires the role that animals play in Smith’s novel, which—like her own book—gives a vision of the world that’s more than merely human.

A blistering book of short fiction from one of Canada’s most loved novelists.

In Skin, Catherine Bush plunges into the vortex of all that shapes us. Summoning relationships between the human and more-than-human, she explores a world where touch and intimacy are both desirable and fraught.

Ranging from the realistic to the speculative, Bush’s stories tackle the condition of our restless, unruly world amidst the tumult of viruses, climate change, and ecological crises. Here, she brings to life unusual and perplexing intimacies: a man falls in love with the wind; a substitute teacher’s behaviour with a student brings unforeseen risks; a woman becomes fixated on offering foot washes to strangers.

Bold, vital, and unmistakably of the moment, Skin gives a charged and animating voice to the question of how we face the world and how, in the process, we discover tenderness and allow ourselves to be transformed.

Catherine Bush is the author of five novels. Her work has been critically acclaimed, published internationally, and shortlisted for numerous awards. Her most recent novel, Blaze Island, was a Globe and Mail and Writers’ Trust of Canada Best Book of the Year, and the Hamilton Reads 2021 Selection. Her other novels include the Canada Reads longlisted Accusation; the Trillium Award shortlisted Claire's Head; the national bestselling The Rules Of Engagement, which was also named a New York Times Notable Book and a L.A. Times Best Book of the Year; and Minus Time, shortlisted for the City of Toronto Book Award. The recipient of numerous fellowships, Bush has been Writer-in-Residence/Landhaus Fellow at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society in Munich and a Fiction Meets Science Fellow at the HWK in Delmenhorst, Germany. An Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Guelph, she lives in Toronto and in an old schoolhouse in Eastern Ontario.

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Worlds collide in the latest BOOKSPO, in which Uzma Jalaluddin contemplates her pivot from romance writing to crime fiction. Or was it actually a pivot after all? It turns out that Jalaluddin’s history with crime fiction goes way back, to her own voracious reading as a teen, and even further—to her grandfather’s library in India, which included the novels of Agatha Christie.

How did one of Christie’s best known works, THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD, inspire DETECTIVE AUNTY, set admidst a Muslim community in modern day Toronto? How was Jalaluddin inspired by her mother’s generation to give a unique twist to her Miss Marple-like character? And how is a mystery novel structured like an inside-out romance (which poses quite the challenge for the writer moving from one genre to the other?). Listen to find out!

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When her grown daughter is suspected of murder, a charming and tenacious widow digs into the case to unmask the real killer in this twisty, page-turning whodunit—the first book in a cozy new detective series from the acclaimed author of Ayesha at Last

After her husband’s unexpected death twelve months earlier, Kausar Khan never thought she’d receive another phone call as heartbreaking—until her thirty-something daughter, Sana, phones to say she’s been arrested for killing the unpopular landlord of her clothing boutique. Determined to help her child, Kausar heads to Toronto for the first time in nearly twenty years.

Returning to the Golden Crescent suburb where she raised her children and where her daughter still lives, Kausar finds that the thriving neighborhood she remembers has changed. The murder of Sana’s landlord is only the latest in a wave of local crimes that have gone unsolved.

And the facts of the case are troubling: Sana found the man dead in her shop at a suspiciously early hour, with a dagger from her windowfront display plunged into his chest. But Kausar—a woman with a keen sense of observation and deep wisdom honed by life experience—senses there’s more to the story than her daughter is sharing.

With the help of some old friends and her plucky teenage granddaughter, Kausar digs into the investigation to uncover the truth. Because who better to pry answers from unwilling suspects than a meddlesome aunty? But even Kausar could not have predicted the secrets, lies, and betrayals she finds along the way . . .

Uzma Jalaluddin is a critically acclaimed and bestselling novelist, playwright, and teacher. She writes nuanced and entertaining stories about Muslims, South Asians, and Canadians and is the author of Much Ado About Nada, Three Holidays and a Wedding, Hana Khan Carries On, and Ayesha At Last. as well as her first play, The Rishta. Her novels have been optioned for film and television, including by Amazon Studios and Mindy Kaling. A high school English teacher, Jalaluddin is also a former contributor to the Toronto Star and the Atlantic. She lives near Toronto with her family.

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The rom-com is made new again, fresh and sparkling, in Rebecca Fisseha’s ONLY BECAUSE IT’S YOU, a novel that takes the fake relationship/marriage trope and gives it real stakes, harnessed to actual situations that people live through all the time as relationships are complicated by factors like citizenship or visas. In ONLY BECAUSE IT’S YOU, the fake marriage is not just a lark, and Miz only agrees to it because she cares about her friend Kal so much, believes in his talents as an actor, and wants to help him have his big chance. Although being anchored in seriousness doesn’t mean the novel isn’t also a lot of fun.

In our conversation, Fisseha talks about how writing scripts was great practice for rom-com dialogue, how she started writing without knowing her story was a rom-com at all, about what she learned from Jesse Q. Sutanto’s DIAL A FOR AUNTIES about interiority, and also about how heavy topics can be handled and even illuminated with humour.

Sometimes you need to take a leap of faith to land exactly where you're meant to be…

Miz is not the marrying kind. She's more of the no-strings-attached kind. No labels, only fun. So, when she finds a diamond ring in her casual-but-very-hot hook-up's gym bag, she immediately ends things and runs.

Kal is one of Miz's best friends, an aspiring actor who moved to Toronto from Ethiopia and is on the brink of his big break. But when he's suddenly at risk of having to return home and leave Toronto forever, Miz panics. She can't imagine her life without Kal.

There's only one solution: Miz will marry Kal to become his spou­sal sponsor. He'll get to keep pursuing his acting career, and she'll get to keep her best friend in the city. It'll be a quick, short only-on-paper marriage between friends, followed by a quick, easy divorce. Nothing will change, and life will go back to normal. Right?

Rebecca Fisseha is an Ethiopian-Canadian writer based in Toronto. She is the author of the novel Daughters of Silence, as well as short stories, creative non-fiction, and personal essays that appear in various publications, including the anthology Addis Ababa Noir and Tongues: On Longing and Belonging Through Language. Rebecca is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers, the Vancouver Film School, and an alumnus of the TIFF Writers' Studio.

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