Kiss and Tell

In Mudflowers, Aley Waterman honestly and painfully depicts the challenge of finding intimacy in an individualistic culture. At once a tale of friendship and heartbreak, an exploration of grief, and an endearing portrait of the Toronto art scene in the early 2010s, the novel offers an all too relatable story encapsulated by its first line: “I wanted so badly to love in a good way.”

That declaration is made by the protagonist, Sophie, a twenty-seven-year-old stained glass artist from the small coastal town of Corner Brook, Newfoundland and Labrador. Reeling from her mother’s recent death, she moves to Toronto’s west end, where she finds a self-serious roommate, Lionel, and starts having casual sex with her childhood friend Alex, who arrived in the big city a couple of years earlier. Fitting in proves difficult for Sophie, a deep thinker and armchair psychoanalyst who laments that the “city people” around her are engulfed in “a surplus of love and...