Will I love What the Living Do?

Brett—stalled in Barrie, Ontario on her tentative way toward whatever the rest of her life might be—keeps her head down and her shoulders taut, clearing brush and dead animals from rural roadsides and relieving her stresses with her much younger musician boyfriend. Then one day there’s bleeding.

Susan Wadds’ novel What the Living Do tracks Brett’s life as she wrestles with an unexpected diagnosis, an unsettling past, and an uncertain future. Its stunningly good prose embeds us in Brett’s sensory world (her doctor “wiggles his fingers into blue stretchy gloves and lets the cuffs snap”) and in the fraught dynamics… show more.