Maximum Shelf author interview: Kelly Anderson

Posted on May 4, 2026 by pagesofjulia

Following Friday’s review of The Wild Beneath, here’s Kelly Anderson: Proof That Magic Exists.

Dr. Kelly Anderson is a family physician with fellowships in HIV and emergency medicine. She has worked in rural and remote emergency departments, spent 15 years at the Inner City Family Health Team at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, and built the clinical team at Felix Health. She completing the Bookends Novel Fellowship and the Gateless Writing Academy and is a certified Gateless writing teacher. Anderson spent much of her childhood in British Columbia, and now lives in Guelph, Ontario, with her family. Her first novel, The Wild Beneath (Park Row, August 4, 2026), is an astonishing story about beauty, magic, and loss on land and sea.

Where did this story begin, for you?

portrait of Kelly Anderson (photo credit: Nicola Toon)

Kelly Anderson
(photo: Nicola Toon)

This story began in 2019 while I was quietly drowning inside my own life, working shift after shift in the emergency department. Somehow, even though I was highly functional and effective at my job, I felt disconnected and flat. I had forgotten what I wanted and needed. I never planned to write fiction. I was doing a three-point turn in my driveway on a winter morning; the sun was blindingly bright and I’d forgotten my sunglasses. It was Walker that found me first, and the idea that as people, we can turn into other things. Metamorphosis. I needed to find metamorphosis in my own life, and it started with writing the first lines of The Wild Beneath.

Those opening lines have a matching sense of huge change. Did that represent directly the need for change in your life?

I knew I wanted to feel more alive. But I had no idea how to do it, and it took me years to change the building blocks of my life. The closer I got to writing Annie’s freedom, the more recognition I faced about my own unrelenting desire for it. Eventually, I left emergency medicine and academic medicine–two things I couldn’t imagine doing before writing the book. I still practice medicine in ways that feel important and meaningful to me, but I had to change the containers I was in and build new ones.

You have been involved in two kinds of work that appear to be very different: medical practice and novel writing. How does one inform or inspire the other?

I think they’re similar work, in that both writers and doctors care so deeply about understanding people. In medicine, we see the most unpolished, vulnerable versions of our patients. In writing, we’re trying to understand human intimacies in order to make our characters feel real on the page–so we can benefit from their wisdom in our own lives. I love my work in medicine. It’s a privilege, and it informs the way I write. It’s an honour to be involved in healing, and at times, I watch modern medicine save lives. But writing is the thing that saves my own life–in small and big and repetitive and enlightening and surprising ways each day when I sit down at my desk.

Your characters and scenes are fully and physically tied to the natural world. Did that require research?

I wanted Hale’s Landing to feel as real as possible, so readers could fall for the landscape in the same way I fall head-over-heels for the Pacific Northwest each time I’m there. British Columbia was my childhood home, so writing about it feels innate. But many experts shaped the details. I’ve read more whale articles than I can count! Understanding whale communication–the little we know about it–felt important to get right. I gathered everything possible about humpback songs; how they’re shared and evolve over seasons and time. I am so grateful to all the wildlife, avian, tugboat, and forestry experts that were willing to spend hours on the phone with me (literally). Please check out the acknowledgements for a long list of these kind human beings.

Are writing and research separate processes?

Always back-and-forth. I write my scenes in uninterrupted 25-minute chunks. If I don’t know something, I insert a placeholder and come back after I’ve researched.

More importantly, I watch for what surfaces in my own life as research. For example, while I was writing The Wild Beneath, friends would send me relevant documentaries or articles, and say, “I don’t know why, but I think you need to read-watch-see this.” It would be an item about sperm whale clicks or tsunamis or women crossing the ocean in a sailboat or logging in Alaska. When things repeatedly surface in front of me, I take it as a sign it belongs in the book.

Where is the line between so-called hard science and magic?

Are science and magic separate, or actually the same thing at different points of human discovery? Is magic just science that we haven’t discovered yet, or don’t yet have the tools or language to measure? In medicine, I’m frequently reminded of how provisional our knowledge is–what we “know” about the body is often temporary and replaced by something else more “true.” In the novel, the imaginative elements point toward what lies beyond our current knowledge of nature, but I wonder if parts of it could actually be true. What we call magic is the presence of mystery–the recognition that we can’t fully explain life with our current models. I’m always on the lookout for magic. If everything were fully explained, there would be no awe, no reverence, no reason to keep listening.

Where do you find magic in medical work?

I think your question speaks to a more general human conundrum–where is the magic? Is there any left? When we aren’t looking for magic, or believe there is none… we can’t find it anywhere. We aren’t sure it exists. But when we believe in something, the evidence for it grows because we’re paying attention. To help me, I have a list in the back of my notebook called “proof that magic exists.”

When I say magic, what I mean is: I believe that life is bigger than we can understand with the human mind, and that benevolent forces are all around us. I choose to believe this because I see it, and because it’s a beautiful and supportive way to live. Because I’m looking for magic, I find proof of it in the smallest of places, including every day in medicine.

It feels like this story could have been set nowhere else than this stretch of Pacific Northwestern coast.

When I was little, I would wander the beaches of southern British Columbia and think to myself: everything is okay because the ocean is here. I believed it. I might still believe it. The trees and water in the Pacific Northwest feel primordial and wordless in a way that awes me. I have so much difficulty fully describing the awe that I had to write a whole book about it.

What are you working on next?

I’m in the middle of writing my second novel! It’s a love story, with similar reverence for the natural world woven inside, and I’m excited to see how it unfolds. I also write a weekly Substack that explores writing, intuition and the mystery of being human.

This interview originally ran on April 7, 2026 as a Shelf Awareness special issue. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

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Maximum Shelf: The Wild Beneath by Kelly Anderson

Posted on May 1, 2026 by pagesofjulia

Maximum Shelf is the weekly Shelf Awareness feature focusing on an upcoming title we love and believe will be a great handselling opportunity for booksellers everywhere. The features are written by our editors and reviewers and the publisher has helped support the issue.

This review was published by Shelf Awareness on April 7, 2026.

Kelly Anderson’s debut novel, The Wild Beneath, is an astonishing act of imagination, firmly rooted in the physical world of a small coastal village and in the ocean itself. With threads of the magical laced throughout, a limited cast of characters wrestles for balance between land and sea and in their relationships with one another. Ever surprising, this spellbinding story holds both science and wonder, always in close touch with the natural world.

The Wild Beneath opens with a scene of beauty and terror. “She begins with a lullaby that sends coyotes fleeing up mountains. Honeybees abandon their hives to the shrill calls of songbirds and barking dogs. Beneath the seafloor, the tectonic plates loosen and rearrange…. A liquid mountain rises in the Pacific Northwest.” The earthquake and tsunami destroy a human settlement and take many lives; the effect is power and pain and loss, described in harrowing detail, but “the ocean will call it a song.” The ocean is never far from the consciousness of Anderson’s characters.

Annie MacLeod is 19, and it is an accident of timing that she happens to be ashore with her grandmother Ruth when the tsunami hits their Canadian village, Hale’s Landing. In all her life, she has spent very few nights away from her parents and their sailboat, Amphitrite. “Maybe they’re not dead,” Ruth tells Annie, although hope fades with time. The two women scour sand and scum from Ruth’s cabin and sift the detritus on the beach for mementos or for anything useful to meeting their most basic needs. Annie suffers from blinding grief and a change in her relationship to the world around her, due to events just before the tsunami that are not immediately revealed. She’s also experiencing a fracture in her relationship with Evan, the boy she’s grown up with, the two of them pushed and pulled like tides. Evan has spent summers on Amphitrite since they were both small, but for most of the year he belongs to the land, where his father, Isaac Hale, runs the timber company that gives the town its name and livelihood. Where Annie is accustomed to listening to the ocean’s nuanced song, Evan listens to the trees.

Then, at the edge of the land and the end of the world as she’s known it, Annie encounters a new arrival walking slowly down the beach. Washed up on the shore, stark naked, about her own age, with “a startling vacancy about him, not fully there, looking past her. His irises are sea-urchin grey with streaks of silver.” He accepts the name Annie offers him: Walker. It seems to Annie that he emits a hum, a sound she feels deep in her bones, that soothes the parts of her that have been jangled by recent events. “This out-of-place person in front of her… who is he? Why does she want him to like everything about her?” Walker is tall and handsome, but almost above those descriptors: he seems elementally tuned to the ocean in a way that speaks to Annie’s bones. He makes her feel safe in a different way than Evan does. In an entirely disordered world, Annie–raised by her two loving parents and by the sea, mostly outside of human society–is unsure of where to turn. Toward her best friend and first love, who offers both stability and complication on land? Or toward the strange newcomer, whose pulse feels like home, and who beckons her to return to the ocean?

With lyricism and a quiet sense of awe, The Wild Beneath reveals a careful focus on balance, rhythm, push-and-pull relationships. It is inhabited by many paired forces: Annie’s parents, Evan’s parents, the land and the ocean, Walker and Evan, the question of whether one stays or goes. Anderson orders the book by the tides: Low, Slack, Flood, High, Ebb. Within each section, there are shifts in time: Now, Before, Six years after, Forty years before. These cycles punctuate Annie’s experiences, which are highly keyed to the natural world: humpback whales, tide pools, sea stars, sand dollars, wind. Flashbacks also offer glimpses of Annie’s father, who was himself once a young person navigating the push-and-pull of land and sea. He loved the ocean, but Annie’s mother seemed preternaturally linked to it–like Walker now. Annie’s upbringing on the boat was one version of balancing those two approaches; now in adulthood, she must chart her own. In perhaps another cycle, Annie’s life represents an attempt to balance her two parents’ experiences of their world, but readers will wait for most of the book to discover what those experiences were.

Anderson offers a novel that is quietly astounding, beautiful even when it conveys profound pain. With unhurried but propulsive pacing, she draws readers into a plot that is both bewildering and bewitching. The Wild Beneath asks wise, subtle questions about the line between science and magic, and suggests that both are found in the natural world. Annie’s struggles with grief, with coming of age, with tough choices, and with a sense of being pulled in two conflicting directions at once, are both universally recognizable and shockingly unique. Her story is haunting and unforgettable.

Rating: 8 oysters.

Come back Monday for my interview with Anderson.

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Son of Nobody by Yann Martel

Posted on April 27, 2026 by pagesofjulia

Profound, heartrending, and endlessly absorbing, this novel of ancient Greek myth and modern family upheaval will transport any reader.

Booker Prize-winner Yann Martel (Life of Pi; The High Mountains of Portugal) intricately nests one story in another in the excellent Son of Nobody. Protagonist Harlow Donne narrates to a specific audience: his eight-year-old daughter, Helen, named after Helen of Troy. Harlow is, or rather was, a Homeric scholar, and he describes to his beloved, story-loving child the year he spent in postdoctoral study at Oxford University. His discovery there of a previously unknown text relating the Trojan War contained many departures from (and frequently “more offbeat” than) Homer’s version. With a blend of erudition and creativity, Harlow pieces together from fragments what he calls The Psoad. This text forms the novel’s body, with copious footnotes by Harlow detailing both the discovery and restoration of that text, as well as his personal life as it slowly unravels during his year away at Oxford, while his wife and daughter remain at home in Canada.

Harlow’s voice is nuanced, clever, and learned; he paints himself a devoted father if admittedly imperfect husband. The narrative in the footnotes conveys Harlow’s academically controversial restoration alongside his journey through scholarship, love, family, and loss. The Psoad is itself a fascinating read for any lover of Greek myth; Harlow argues “that the heroes of the Epic Cycle, in this case Psoas of Midea, created the space for the appearance of their complement, Jesus of Nazareth, the other foundational figure of Western culture.” These layers, and their quietly complex interplay, showcase Martel’s strengths: subtlety, profundity, humor, pathos.

This review originally ran in the April 3, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Rating: 8 chameleons.

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It’s Hard to Be an Animal by Robert Isaacs

Posted on April 24, 2026 by pagesofjulia

The sudden ability to hear animals speak offers perspective, romance, and adventure to an awkward young man in this whimsical, tender first novel.

Robert Isaacs’s first novel, It’s Hard to Be an Animal, is a feat of humor, yearning, adventure, angst, and romance. In following a lonely, self-doubting protagonist, this remarkable debut manages to be about all of life, in its most unlikely twists.

Readers meet Henry on a first date at a sidewalk café in Manhattan. Nervous Henry is an inveterate doormat, but he is funny and kind. His coworker Jackie has set him up with Molly, who is playful and ebullient; Henry is quite sure she’s out of his league, but she likes him nevertheless. “Within the hour” of their meeting, “a migrating songbird weighing less than an ounce would upend his life.” Coffee goes well, so they take a walk in Central Park, where Henry spots a magnolia warbler. The sweet, decorative little bird considers the pair, and then speaks. “Fuck off,” it says clearly to Henry and then continues in a similarly foul-mouthed territorial vein. When Henry gets home to the apartment he shares with an exuberant Belarussian named Yaryk, he discovers that his housemate’s two betta fish are involved in an exchange of creatively nasty insults. The situation continues with dogs, a police horse, pigeons: Henry can now hear animals talking. If that fact were not shocking enough, they all seem to be terribly angry. He questions his sanity and finds the animals’ rage depressing.

Henry thinks himself a failure in all parts of his life, but readers can see that he has true friends in Yaryk and Jackie; he handles workplace dramas with aplomb, if also self-denigration; Molly’s attraction to him is genuine, even as they weather miscommunications verging on the Shakespearean. Painfully conflict-averse, Henry is challenged enough by human drama; fat-shaming sparrows and judgmental pythons threaten his threadbare mental health but also offer perspective. When he overhears subway rats discussing a body-disposal site, he inadvertently lets it slip to the unusually adventurous Molly. The budding couple soon find themselves enmired in the New York City subway system and an intrigue of increasingly high stakes. And a neighbor’s yappy Pomeranian turns out to be just the font of wisdom that the pushover Henry needed. In a newly cacophonous world, he may finally find his own voice.

It’s Hard to Be an Animal is one laugh, dire escapade, or poignant moment away from either disaster or nirvana. Hilarious, heartfelt, ever-surprising, Henry’s story is one of hope, redemption, and self-discovery.

This review originally ran in the April 3, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 windows repaired.

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A Perfect Hand by Ayelet Waldman

Posted on April 17, 2026 by pagesofjulia

This twist on the historical romantic drama considers a lady’s maid, the valet she falls for, and the wider world for which she yearns.

A Perfect Hand by Ayelet Waldman (Bad Mother; Daughter’s Keeper; Love and Treasure) is a captivating historical drama, an appealing romance, and a story of political awakening, cleverly packaged as a novel of manners. This shapeshifter reads as an engaging and witty work of escapism until it turns to more serious-minded concerns, while never losing its charm. Set in English country estates and the grimy city of London in the 19th century, the rollicking narrative ranges from frivolous upper-class parties and fancy dress to the literal and metaphorical dirty laundry that the service class must process.

Alice Lockey, the daughter of a tenant farmer, has done well for herself, working her way up to the position of lady’s maid to Lady Jemima, the silly, indulged elder daughter of a lord. Alice is skilled, intelligent, and eager to learn and to better herself; she hasn’t decided what that will mean but is reluctant to follow her mother’s advice to pursue marriage as a highest aim. Then she meets Charlie, a similarly above-average valet (also having climbed above his humble beginnings) to a viscount. Charlie and Alice tumble into the meager courtship that they can sneak on their half-days off, but they wish for more. Quickly realizing that their employers’ marriage is the only route to their own, they determine to set up Lady Jemima–infatuated with another man, who is a bit of a rake–and the deeply eccentric Lord Wynstowe. This is a tall order, but the young lovers are highly motivated and well positioned for persuading.

Even as their schemes near fruition, however, Alice learns and yearns and grows. A reader (unusual for her class, but encouraged by Lady Jemima’s iconoclastic spinster aunt), she encounters pamphlets by Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill. Questions of class reflect directly on her life and Charlie’s; certain versions of feminism seem aimed at her lady’s class rather than her own, but Alice wonders what the suffrage movement might do for even a servant girl. Between sewing ribbons and lace onto her lady’s latest dresses and washing her foul undergarments, running her errands and helping her dress, Alice considers the various lives she might wish for, if she were able to choose for herself.

A Perfect Hand works subtly on several levels, exulting in the details of the Victorian setting (dress, diet, and indignities), exclaiming over Alice and Charlie’s sympathetic romance, and pressing the exceptional heroine toward her best and truest self. Waldman even exposes a fun and poignant final surprise in the narrator’s identity. With a nod to Jane Austen but a firm focus on the servant class, this versatile novel will entertain and stay with readers long past its final pages.

This review originally ran in the March 31, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 seedcakes.

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The Pillagers’ Guide to Arctic Pianos by Kendra Langford Shaw

Posted on April 3, 2026 by pagesofjulia

In the Arctic, homesteaders dive for antique pianos and struggle to survive in this compulsively readable first novel of adventure and familial love.

“My little brother, Finley, drowned the first time wrestling the Napoleon pianoforte under the galactic starlight of an Arctic sunset; the way he later told the story, the piano had it coming.” The Pillagers’ Guide to Arctic Pianos is a wildly imaginative story centered on the adventures and trials of a homesteader family in the Arctic. Kendra Langford Shaw’s first novel follows these determined renegades as they establish and struggle to keep lives, livelihoods, homes, and community in a tremendously harsh environment.

Chapters alternate between characters and perspectives, beginning with siblings Milda, Finley, and Temperance; their parents, Viola and Fry; their ancestor Moose Bloomer, who began his immigration to the Arctic Territory as part of a large train of settlers but was, at 12, one of a few survivors to make it onto the permafrost; and the shrinking but hardy next generation. In a fantastical twist, each settler family brought a wildly impractical piece of equipment. “Issuing each family a map and an orange flag, the deed to their land hing[ed] upon their ability to ‘civilize.’ They were required to bring salt pork, botanical texts, and pianos–music, music being what would elevate the territory from raw, unbroken land into a homeland worth having.” Moose’s train lost and abandoned pianos across the region before settling and striving; pianofortes, surprisingly preserved by freezing waters, washed about the floors of the ocean and the Kamikaze River. Later homesteaders work as piano hunters. Antiques pulled up from the deep command impressive prices. Readers meet Finley when he is a young boy obsessed with recovering his family’s Napoleon, and this obsession will guide several lives.

In this strange Arctic world in which sunken pianos are desirable prey and their ivory keys can be found in the bellies of trout, glaciers melt, sea levels rise, and scant resources dwindle. Families battle the elements for survival, and they love one another in traditional and nontraditional ways. Viola, Fry, and their children live in a house on stilts, farming octopus and collecting sea beans, with a sea lion as a pet. They yearn only for “what other families had long ago achieved in terms of the conveniences of modern life: sanitation and heating ducts, coffee, dental work, telescopes, beehives.” Shaw’s imagination is broad, her characters delightful, and their fates often painful but also transcendent. The Pillagers’ Guide to Arctic Pianos is a lovely profile of a singular, stark place and a small, tight cast of indelibly colorful characters: a heart-wrenching, unforgettable debut.

This review originally ran in the March 23, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 pips.

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Mrs. Shim Is a Killer by Kang Jiyoung, trans. by Paige Morris

Posted on March 6, 2026 by pagesofjulia

In this bloody but cheerful novel, a middle-aged widow and mother of two becomes a contract killer to support her family, reinventing herself along the way.

Kang Jiyoung’s Mrs. Shim Is a Killer is a kaleidoscopic novel of murder-for-hire, crisscrossing loyalties, self-determination, and dark humor. In Paige Morris’s translation from the Korean, Kang’s matter-of-fact prose reveals a sly, absurdist wit. This playfully murderous thriller is not soon forgotten.

In the first chapter, readers meet Mrs. Shim. A 51-year-old widow, she supports a family of three; her son is of university age, her daughter just younger. Since the death of her husband five years ago, she has struggled to provide for her family by working in a butcher’s shop, relying on her knife skills to eke out a living while dutifully preparing kimchi, soybean soup, and other staples at home. When she loses her job, she is desperate for other work–not easy for an ajumma, or middle-aged woman, to find. At the Smile Private Detective Agency, however, she meets a boss impressed by her use of a knife. “I’d like you to become a killer,” the man says matter-of-factly, and Mrs. Shim finds she is in no position to turn down the gold bar he offers. Reluctant at first but driven by her need to provide for her children, she becomes Smile’s best killer yet, causing surprised rumors to circulate about the knife-wielding ajumma.

Mrs. Shim Is a Killer shifts perspective to follow one character and then another, from a long list of players in Mrs. Shim’s story. Aside from the title character, chapter titles refer to them by epithet: The Boss, The Shaman, The Confidant, The Daughter. Intrigue unfolds in this series of puzzle pieces, which provides varying angles on events where killers and amateurs off killers, bosses, and more. Because not all of these character spotlights take place in the same timeline, old secrets also come to light, and present-day rivals may reveal more nuanced relationships in the past. In final standoff scenes, characters are set against one another in unexpected arrangements and, through it all, readers root for Mrs. Shim, a reluctant but determined assassin.

Kang (The Shop for Killers) plays off expectations about mothers, lovers, and cultural norms to her reader’s constant surprise. With a complexly twisting plot, disarming characters, and a deceptive sense of humor, Mrs. Shim Is a Killer breaks genre boundaries in a surprisingly hopeful package. Bloody but cheerful, this unusual tale is entertaining and strangely cozy.

This review originally ran in the February 26, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 fishcakes.

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author interview: Polly Atkin

Posted on February 23, 2026 by pagesofjulia

Following my review of The Company of Owls, here’s Polly Atkin: The Art of Noticing.

Polly Atkin lives in Grasmere, in the English Lake District, and is co-owner of the historic independent bookshop Sam Read Bookseller. She writes poetry (Basic Nest Architecture; Much with Body) and nonfiction (Recovering Dorothy; Some of Us Just Fall). She writes and talks about living with chronic illness, disability and the environment, living in a rural place, and, as a disabled person, access to nature and to the arts. In The Company of Owls (Milkweed; reviewed in this issue), she considers solitude, companionship, and the natural world through the lens of some very special neighbors.

Were you always drawn to owls?

Yes! I am a child of the ’80s, so I grew up with lots of fictional owls, like the mechanical owl from Clash of the Titans who I absolutely adored. We had owls that would call from these very large, old trees where I grew up, although I didn’t see them often. Athena’s owl was the symbol of my school when I was seven, and we got a little badge with a stylized owl face on it. They were a presence in my life.

At what point in your owl observations did you realize you were working on a book?

Very late on. The book became a book through amazing happenstance. It was one of those beautiful coincidences that can only happen when you’ve been in an industry for a while.

There are poems about owls in all of my collections, so I’ve been writing about owls for a long time. My agent Caro [Clarke] was at the London Book Fair the year after my book Some of Us Just Fall came out, at the next table to Sarah Rigby, the editor at Elliott & Thompson. Sarah came back from a break saying, “I heard someone talking about buying a book called The Solitude of Owls, and I’m really jealous. I wish I’d bought that book!” And eventually they realized she’d misheard, and that book didn’t exist at all. But Caro thought about my owls and said, actually, I think I could get you that book if you want it.

So I had this amazing e-mail from Caro saying, listen, you know those owls you’ve been writing poems about, would you write a book about them? I said, YES! Yes please! Nothing like that has ever happened in my writing life before, that someone’s said, here, I’ll give you a chunk of money to write about that thing you’re already writing about.

None of us have any idea what she’d misheard in the first place.

As a writer of both poetry and prose, is it always clear which is called for?

I write my prose in a similar way to how I write poetry. I think very hard about every word. That sounds patronizing, like obviously other writers don’t! But the rhythm and the syntax is as important to me in prose as it is in poetry. I have to wait for the right way to say something. For everything I write, 90% of the time is thinking and percolating time, and 10% is the actual writing down. It’s very voice driven.

A poem is much more open. You can leave things dangling; the white space makes a lot of the meaning. I used to say to students: so much of the poem is what the reader brings to it. It’s a drink that you need to dilute. The poem is a really concentrated flavor, and the reader brings the water that makes it drinkable. All of that happens in space on the page, and how those images and metaphors move from person to person. This happens with prose as well, but in a different, more truncated way.

How does poetry influence your prose?

So much of poetry is about attention to what’s around us. Williams Wordsworth says poetry is about having a watchful heart and a keen eye and ear. You’re listening and observing what’s around you, but you’re also seeing beyond that. In The Prelude, he says poets and prophets are similar because they both see the unseen. That art of noticing is at the core of both poetry and prose for me.

The art of questioning too. The prose I’m interested in is open: it asks questions, raises ideas, and doesn’t necessarily tell you an answer. Writing is a moving toward understanding. That’s why I do it, and I’m trying to communicate that to other people, but I have to learn something too or it seems dead to me, kind of flat. That fundamental underlay of what’s happening with poetry is always happening for me with prose as well.

How has owning a bookstore changed your relationship with writing (or reading)?

Oh my goodness! To see people being enthusiastic about books. We’re very lucky with our shop. It’s been there since 1887, right in the center of Grasmere, where we have footfall all year round. People visit from around the world. Some have a long history with the shop, whose grandparents brought them because the grandparents shopped there. You get this amazing sense of the reading public, and I love that. All these different people coming in, excited about books–I’m getting a bit teary just thinking about it. So much of the time we’re told people don’t read anymore, especially young people, but what I see in the shop is all these young people come in, and they’re thrilled. They buy all sorts of different books; you can never guess what they will buy off of what they look like. Seeing that side of things is so heartening.

What do you wish more people knew about owls?

They are really loving. That’s the thing that struck me watching them. We often think about predators as having less care, less empathy. I think particularly birds of prey we don’t think of as family animals. Seeing the owlets care for each other, and the parents care for them, was just amazing.

There’s a farm in Yorkshire with all this owl habitat, and owl cams in the nests, and the owner had a pair of owls that lost their chicks. But somebody gave him some orphaned owlets, and he popped them in the nest, and they just went: oh! Look! A chick! And now every year he ends up with orphaned owlets and he pops them in with their chicks and the parents go, OMG! Another owlet! This is amazing! They’re so happy to accept them. It’s not just red in tooth and claw. There are lots of examples of care and cooperation.

This interview originally ran in the February 6, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

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The Left and the Lucky by Willy Vlautin

Posted on February 16, 2026 by pagesofjulia

In a gritty world bordering on hopelessness, a man and a boy form a friendship that may just save them both.

Willy Vlautin (The Horse; The Night Always Comes; Don’t Skip Out on Me) applies his characteristic compassion and spare tone to an unlikely friendship in The Left and the Lucky, a novel of hard times and scant hope. A boy whose life has been ruled by abuse and neglect and a man whose hard work has been rewarded by betrayal and loss find each other in working-class Portland, Ore., and forge a hard-won bond to their mutual benefit.

Russell is eight years old and small for his age. He lives with his grandmother, who has dementia; his mother, who works nights; and his teenaged brother, who is angry and troubled. As the latter spins further afield and poses an increasingly serious physical threat, Russell dreams of building a boat or an airplane to take him away to an unpopulated island near Hawai’i: he can think of no nearer salvation.

Eddie lives next door. He runs a small house-painting business, working six or more days a week, and his main employee is a scarcely functioning alcoholic whose paychecks Eddie handles for him with scrupulous honesty. It will take the bulk of the novel for Vlautin to reveal the rest of Eddie’s painful past, gradually filling in the reasons for his generosity. Russell turns up on Eddie’s rounds of the neighborhood: out too late, hiding from something. The man offers the boy food, a ride home. Russell begins waiting in Eddie’s backyard each night after work; he cleans paintbrushes after the workday. Eddie gives him odd jobs and shelter from violence. Each is lacking something in a life lived on the margins, but together they begin to build a slight, meaningful solution. They restore an old Pontiac and care for an old dog. Each finds in the other someone who needs them to survive.

In his eighth novel, Vlautin continues to focus upon an American underclass marked by desperation and poverty, people often forgotten or abandoned. With a gruff tenderness, a quiet lyricism, and moments of humor, he highlights not only the built family that Russell and Eddie assemble, but also motley characters from their neighborhood: Eddie’s employees, an aging aunt, a waitress with goals, Russell’s seething brother. The Left and the Lucky is often grim, but Eddie’s dogged decency uplifts even in this grayscale world of limited options; his unwillingness to give up on Russell offers a slim but profound thread of hope unto the story’s end. Vlautin’s character sketches and the careful value he places on perseverance are not soon forgotten.

This review originally ran in the February 13, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 brushes.

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Like This, But Funnier by Hallie Cantor

Posted on February 6, 2026 by pagesofjulia

A 30-something woman writing for television comedy in Los Angeles must wrestle with personal and social as well as professional qualms in this discomfiting and hilarious debut.

Hallie Cantor’s first novel, Like This, But Funnier, is a hilarious and brutally honest send-up of comedy writing for television, a serious consideration of the woes of modern womanhood, and a compassionate telling of one woman’s fumbling journey.

Caroline Neumann is 34 years old. After a relatively successful and socially engaged stint in New York writing for a sketch comedy show, she moved to Los Angeles to write for a sitcom, which was then canceled. She’s been working from home for the past four years–if you can call it “working” when she’s mostly doing unpaid “development.” “In their twenties, she and [husband] Harry had happily not known together” whether they wanted to have kids. But in the interim, he became sure that he did, while Caroline remains doubtful. Harry used to be unhappy at work, too, but now he is a therapist. “They’d made a little home in the despair together. Until he’d abandoned her to go off and get a fulfilling career that he loved. How dare he.” Now, dubiously employed and depressed, Caroline navigates lonely, work-from-home desperation, cataloging all the ways in which she can feel bad (down to the varieties of milk she might put in her coffee: “oat milk: cliché spoiled California millennial princess, very bad”), while Harry nudges her to consider motherhood.

Propelled by work-related frustration and curiosity about Harry’s favorite therapy client, whom she knows only as “the Teacher,” Caroline indulges in a tiny bit of snooping. When she happens to mention a tidbit from the Teacher’s life in a meeting with a producer, however, events snowball beyond Caroline’s control, until she finds herself working on an actual television script featuring the confidential details of a woman’s life that she has no business knowing. Caroline, for whom failure and rejection have come to feel like a professional norm, figures that rather than withdraw from the questionable project, she’ll just tank the pitch meeting: “Why bother quitting when you could fail instead?” And just to keep things complicated, she assents to freeze her eggs for possible future motherhood, as “spiritual atonement for stalking and befriending [her] husband’s favorite therapy patient.” What could go wrong?

Cantor brings her experience writing for Arrested Development, Dollface, and Inside Amy Schumer to Caroline’s often excruciating story: despite the considerable pathos, these conflicts are deeply funny. This protagonist–liable to clog a toilet at the most inopportune moment, frozen by self-loathing, desperate to do the right thing in an industry that’s never heard of it–is, against all odds and her own fears, uncomfortably easy to relate to. Like This, But Funnier is winning, awkward, and unforgettable.

This review originally ran in the January 29, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 Zoom calls.

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