But now for a summer book that I actually read out-of-season: I was entranced by Mireille Gagné’s Horsefly (2024), translated by Pablo Strauss the following year. (Published by Coach House in Canada, New Cross Press in England, La livre de Poche in France).

It’s turned a few heads, and it’s won a few awards, which would be good reason to recommend it. But one reason I want to recommend it, is that I don’t have a single clear reason for recommending it, because it’s not a book that’s easy to define or categorise.

I’ve seen some marketing categories, while checking out the world rights (to see if I was about to recommend a book to international readers who can’t easily access Canadian indies) but although none are inaccurate, somehow they don’t quite feel wholly satisfactory either. There’s one blurb that I really like, but I’m sure that a few of you would read that blurb and think “nope, that’s not a book for me” but that you’d be swept away by the story. Horsefly is hard to pin down.

What’s not debatable: it’s 150 pages long in the Canadian edition, and presented in a striking way with full-page images marking the individual segments of story. Which is to say that it could read very quickly. Maybe in an afternoon even. Which is always remarkable, but particularly in seasonal extremes, if you are lucky enough to have the leisure to simply sit for a few hours and enter an imagined world.

(But that’s not how I read it. Instead, I mostly read a single section on a series of days, but allowed myself to read the final two sections together. Immediately I felt as though I wanted to linger on what Gagné was about… whatever that proved to be… to just let it hang in the air, despite being almost undeniably curious about where it was all going, and therefore not wanting to rush.)

It’s also undeniable that there is an historical element to the story, with an important part of it set in 1942 Quebec. Because it matters that it’s wartime: that power is to be secured and wielded, that sacrifices will be made in the name of progress and victory. This one plot element is easily summarised, but the novel is also about how family ties are maintained and strained, about friendships and clubbing, and about what changes (and doesn’t) across a handful of decades: from the day-to-day work required to cover the cost of food and housing, to the sweep to historical trends and patterns.

There are lacklustre moments that focus on the effort required to do a job when you’re tired and overdrawn, outrageous moments that seem to belong to a thriller, and tender moments that had me teary. I don’t mean to say that this slim novel will satisfy all the dedicated workplace-novel lovers, the thriller aficionados, and the sentimental readers, but that it’s a novel that a wide variety of readers could enjoy, not despite it being strange and surprising but because it’s strange and surprising.

Gagné’s prose is spare and it feels like an editorial eye has circled across the manuscript countless times, hovering over every single, potentially extraneous word. Throughout, it’s a sweaty and moist story. There’s dampness in the creases of the book’s spine, a drone in the background that you’ll drown out with a fan (if you’re lucky) or a heater (if it’s winter right now).

What surprised me most… well, I can’t say that. And I can’t say the thing that next-most surprised me either.

But I can say that, after those things, I was surprised that I wanted to keep and reread my copy, because I had all the same hesitations that you might be having right now (if you’ve read the blurbs or the summaries).

And summer is my least favourite season, but I’d stick my feet in a cool tub of water to reread what Mireille Gagné’s done here. And maybe I could figure out how to talk about it without spoiling any of it either.