John Baker’s Blog

In this 1992 novel Carol Shields sets up two separate people, living in the same Canadian town, Winnipeg, and, although we know that they’re going to meet and get together, we don’t know how.
Fay Mcleod is thirty-five and is writing a book about mermaids, she has never fully committed to a man before . Tom [...]

. . . Quality orgasms were the only kind worth having, she told him. She said this sitting on the edge of Tom’s new bed. Her clothes were off. She flicked back her short hair meaningfully. Her face was vaporous, her eyes gelid.
They had been to a movie, a German soft-porn piece with the kind [...]

Novelists do not write into a void. They require an answering response, an audience of readers outside their family circle, and they also need the approval that professional publication brings. Next week, next year; surely she would hear soon. This hope must have remained with her, but the impulse to produce more novels withered.
It might [...]

For some reason I remembered, on waking, how during the first summer of the new millennium, we arrived on the banks of a wet Norwegian fjord and wondered for three days and nights if the weather would take a turn for the better, as it had in previous years, or if we were doomed to [...]