From the Giller-shortlisted author of Glorious Frazzled Beings comes a beguiling debut novel humming with sensuality, intelligence, and a tinge of the absurd.After years of shouldering the childcare and housework, trying to keep her creative life and career alive, and managing her husband’s existential anxieties, the once whimsical Sarah is too burned out to dream. Most days, all she can muster is an imaginary version of her husband Trevor, one who actually listens to her, an almost-IRL replica of the husband in the picture-perfect image of their family she crafts online. Meanwhile, Trevor is caught in a downward spiral of his own. Strangled by his fear of artistic mediocrity and mounting sexual frustration, he fantasizes about the early college days when their romance was still athrill with seductive possibility.When both Sarah and Trevor secretly stumble on an auteur porn film based on the ancient Greek myth of Ariadne and Dionysus, they are immediately sucked into a dizzying maze of obsession, betrayal, and duplicate selves echoing backwards in time. With the arrival of a brilliant, alluring new student in Trevor’s university class, the line between fantasy and reality is increasingly blurred, threatening to collapse the walls of their mythology forever.With startling psychological insight, a sly sense of humour, and all the peculiar twists of a fairytale, Variations on a Dream is a fearless exploration of the lengths we will go to save what we believe to be a dream come true.

An intimate memoir about the importance of community and care in a world that can feel impossibly broken—and a story about accidentally going viral while tending to a colony of feral cats.When Courtney Gustafson moved into a rental house in the Poets Square neighborhood of Tucson, Arizona, she didn’t know that the property came with thirty feral cats. Focused only on her own survival—in a new relationship, during a pandemic, with poor mental health and a job that didn’t pay enough—Courtney was reluctant to spend any of her own time or money caring for the wayward animals.But the cats—their pleading eyes, their ribs showing, the new kittens born in the driveway—didn’t give her a choice.She had no idea about the grief and hardship of animal rescue, the staggering size of the problem in neighborhoods across the country. And she couldn’t have imagined how that struggle—toward an ethics of care, of individuals trying their best amid spectacularly failing systems—would help pierce a personal darkness she’d wrestled with for much of her life. She also didn’t expect that the TikTok and Instagram accounts she created to share the quirky personalities of the wild but lovable cats, like Monkey, Goldie, Francois, and Sad Boy, would end up saving her home.Courtney writes toward a vision of connectedness, showing how taking care of the cats reshaped her understanding of empathy, resilience, and the healing power of wholly showing up for something outside yourself. She takes us from the dark alleys where she feeds feral cats to inside the tragically neglected homes where she climbs over piles of trash, and occasionally animals, and then into her own driveway with the cats she loves and must sometimes let go. Compelling and tender, Poets Square is as much about cats as it is about the urgency of care, community, and a little bit of dumb hope.