Bookspo

After I had Sharon Bala on my podcast in January to talk about her amazing new novel Good Guys , she reached out to ask if I would like her to interview me on the pod when my own book came out, and my automatic answer was OH MY GOODNESS, YES, PLEASE! And so here it is, a situation in which the BOOKSPO host chair is commandeered by one of the smartest, kindest, most excellent writers I know. Thank...

Purchase STARRY STARRY NIGHT from your local indie bookstore https://www.indiebookstores.ca/book/9781771669566/ Buy tickets for the March 5 Toronto launch of Definitely Thriving : https://paradiseonbloor.com/movies/bridget-joness-diary-definitely-thriving-book-launch-with-kerry-clare/ Buy tickets to Blue Heron Book's Book Drunkard Festival Brunch at Wooden Sticks in Uxbridge on March 22 https://bl...

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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_...

Purchase GOD GU YS 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...

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/9...

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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...

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 i...

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 i...

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...

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 Christi...

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 agree...

In our conversation, Lindsay Zier-Vogel lays out the creative threads she wove together to create her second novel, The Fun Times Brigade , which included some people’s lacklustre response to her work writing children’s books, the silly (and often inappropriate) songs her husband has been making up as long as she’s known him, grieving the loss of creative partners, and the overwhelming pressure an...

Last year, Greg Rhyno won my heart forever with his (unlicensed) PI Dame Polara, reluctantly solving crimes in an evocatively rendered Toronto. Even better? Who By Fire was the first in a series, which Rhyno has followed up a year later with the just-as-excellent Who By Water , in which the reader finds Dame now as a besotted single mother toting around a two-year-old, which makes moonlighting as...

I’ve admired Mikka Jacobsen’s craft ever since I read her essay collection, MODERN FABLES, a couple of years ago, and was thrilled to see that everything I love about her voice returns in her latest book, the short story collection GOOD VICTORY, stories mostly set in Alberta, in which the mundane mingles with the extraordinary to incredible results. It was also such a pleasure to meet her online a...

Season Three of BOOKSPO launches here! But if podcasts aren’t your thing, you can opt out of receiving BOOKSPO notifications. Go to https://substack.com/home and log in. Click on your personal icon in the top corner to find a drop-down menu. Select “SETTINGS.” Scroll down to find your subscriptions, and click on the arrow beside PICKLE ME THIS. Scroll to “NOTIFICATIONS” where you can opt out of an...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit kerryreads.substack.com Hello everyone, especially my new subscribers. I’m so glad you’re here. Part of my Substack project is my podcast, BOOKSPO, whose third season launches in April, available to all listeners. In the meantime, I’m sharing bonus episodes like this one for paid subscribers only. You can listen to a preview above, and...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit kerryreads.substack.com Thank you for being a part of Seasons 1 and 2 of BOOKSPO. This bonus episode is for paid subscribers (who also receive access to my monthly essays—there is one coming early next week about Margaret Laurence’s THE DIVINERS). I hope you enjoy this behind-the-scenes glimpse into my reading life, and marriage, and ou...

We’ve made it to another Season Finale! Thank you for coming with me on this podcasting journey this year, and helping me reach the milestones of 24 episodes, 3.8K downloads (and counting), one whole sponsored episode, and so many great conversations both on and off the pod. A year ago, this project was just a distant dream that I was almost too terrified to realize, but I made the leap, here we a...

As a huge fan of books about houses and home, I fell in love with Jenny Haysom’s debut novel KEEP and was swept away by this story of three lives connected by the very unlikely occupation of real estate home staging, this inspired by Jenny’s own experience with this job a long time ago, as she explains to me in our BOOKSPO conversation. And this was a conversation I enjoyed in particular because J...

New BOOKSPO, and this time we’re talking about THE ELEVATOR, by Priya Ramsingh, a book about modern love that read like a breeze, but also tackles important questions about race, trauma, toxic relationships, eating disorders and life in the city. It’s the story of Aria and Rob, who are familiar to each other from encounters in their building’s elevator, and about what transpires between them when...

I’ve been so looking forward to sharing my conversation with Richard Van Camp, whose childhood obsession with the works of Stephen King (and so many other iconic authors!) was a force behind BEAST, the 30th book of Richard’s 30 years in publishing. BEAST is the kind of book that his younger self would have wanted to read, although I think readers of all ages will appreciate this story blending hor...