Final Canada Reads book I didn't get from the library until well after the debates were over. This one went down third, which is fair in that the competition was stiff this year, but I'd have also been happy with a win for Nasrallah.

The main character is a single mother who's washed up in Montreal in the 1980s, after escaping the Lebanese civil war. She's trained as a French teacher, but runs into a wall of pure laine demands for accreditation, the only job she can find is as a diet consultant on a meal package hotline.

I was worried going in that the book would be fatphobic, but I thought it handled the topic very sensitively, with most of the focus being on the emotional isolation of the people calling the hotline, and how it becomes in a way trauma work for the protagonist, who is not short of trauma already. I know a lot of people really liked the 1980s, setting, but that didn't leave as much of an impression on me (I think anyone who grew up in Montreal then would get a kick out of it, though).

The writing is mostly contemplative and interior, as the heroine tries to figure out who she is in this new country, and how she and her son might fit into it, while mourning her kidnapped husband, who is probably dead, but may still be alive. I thought the author did a beautiful job of showing her displacement in both time and space, and how she keeps drifting back to her home country, as well as imagining elements of Lebanon in Quebec. The whole thing was lovely and bittersweet.