Winner of the 2023 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize

An outrageously comic novel documents a middle-aged writer and mother's grappling with mid-life crisis—her husband's and her own.

Preoccupied with her fledgling literary career, intent on the all-consuming consolations of philosophy, and scrambling to meet the demands of her four children, the acutely myopic and chronically inattentive Vita Glass doesn’t notice that her house and her marriage are competing to see which can fall apart fastest. She can barely find time for her writing career, and just when her newfound success in vegetable erotica is beginning to take off. Our heroine’s only tried and trusted escape is the blissful detachment of Keith's hairdressing salon, but when her husband leaves the country, unannounced, she decides to do likewise—in the opposite direction, and with their children. Drawn from the pages of Vita’s journal, this outrageously comic novel documents Vita's passage through a mid-life crisis and explores all the ways we deceive each other and ourselves.

Praise for Pauline Holdstock

“Holdstock writes powerfully in Frankie’s voice, drawing readers into his internal life … absorbing.”
—Quill & Quire 

“Pauline Holdstock enchants with a spell of delectable storytelling … the novel’s wonderment and delight in the possibilities of life is an effervescent tonic.”
—Vancouver Sun

“Captivating … An intriguing mystery … The novel finds its way with charming intrigue and humour.”
—Winnipeg Free Press

“Holdstock’s writing moves seamlessly between her research and her polished storytelling of people, landscape and grief. These are familiar preoccupations, but she continues to make them compelling and rich.”
—National Post

“Pauline Holdstock’s language is so powerful, her writing so wrought with emotion and beauty, that you become fully lost in her world.”
—Winnipeg Review