LIT

LIT: In the Season of Emptiness Colin Linder

When the children leave and the house goes quiet, Julie Kincaid expects to feel relieved. Instead, at 48, she finds herself standing in a Halifax winter at two in the morning, Googling symptoms she recognizes from her mother, wondering when exactly she stopped being the protagonist of her own life.

Then Tammy comes back.

They were twenty-three the first time. It ended the way things end when you choose the practical life over the true one - quietly, reasonably, with excellent justifications. Twenty-eight years later, Tammy is back in Halifax, and one cup of coffee near the harbour undoes more than Julie is prepared to admit. And Julie's husband, Evan, waits at home.

LIT: In the Season of Emptiness is a sharp, bittersweet, and deeply honest novel about what happens when a woman who has spent decades being reliable for everyone else finally becomes unreliable for herself. It is about perimenopause and professional invisibility, about marriages that go quiet in ways no one planned, about the difference between the life you built and the life you actually want to be living.

It is about windows. And what you do once one opens.

With dark humour, psychological precision, and an internal committee that never quite agrees, Colin Linder's novel announces a major new voice in Canadian literary fiction - one unafraid to sit with the complicated, the unresolved, and the quietly devastating.