Summer read takes on tough topics in lyrical, page-turning prose

The Road Between Us is an ideal summer literary read that clips along in episodic bursts as its smart, flawed characters navigate love, sex and regret within a feminist narrative sensibility.

Yet its propulsive, pleasing tempo does not gloss over deeper issues of race and sexuality in the #MeToo era, as the ensemble cast interacts with each other over decades and across continents, entangled in love and power dynamics shaped by wider politics as well as formative childhood experiences.

This is Montreal author Bindu Suresh’s sophomore work of fiction. The former journalist took over 10 years to complete her first book, the novella-length 26 Knots — this because she was also busy completing medical school and specializing in pediatrics as well as starting a family.

26 Knots was a critical success and a CBC Best Book of 2019.

Her follow-up novel, The Road Between Us, offers up a compelling cast of characters, including lawyer Estela, whose early romantic encounter marks a change in career path and a delayed moral reckoning; diplomat Ash, who navigates bisexuality and racism growing up in Canada and later in his professional postings in Buenos Aires and Beijing; nurse Ophélie, who makes an irrevocable medical mistake and abandons a healthy relationship due to a triggered “remembered aloneness;” and Roman, the tenured, divorced English prof at McGill, who is a doting father with a penchant for dating his students.

The Montreal university setting — specifically within the Department of English — of Roman’s story will hit close to home for readers who were affected directly or indirectly by real-life #MeToo investigations that have transpired in post-secondary contexts in that city and beyond.

It is an exercise in discomfort and enlightenment, however, to then empathize with Roman, whose perspective we inhabit for a time as he offers queasy insights into some of his male colleagues, noting that “he had fallen in their regard not because of his misconduct but because he’d gotten caught.”

In a nod to the title, roads themselves take on different forms and meaning in the novel. They are pathways for adventure and sites of destruction, as when Ash’s conservative cousin dies in a motorcycle accident in India while showing off for a girl, or when Ophélie meets Ash and sparks fly in more ways than one after she hits his bike with her car.

The road is also metaphorical and becomes a threshold for attraction in Suresh’s numerous arresting descriptions of what should be a fleeting and unnameable experience: the just-before subtle gestures of desire, one body’s miniscule movements towards another, those nearly imperceptible physical shifts, latent and barely there yet brimming with possibility.

The publisher, Assembly Press, is a recent literary start-up based in Prince Edward County, Ont. that has brought out an impressive and eclectic list so far, including Phoebe Wang’s Relative to Wind: On Sailing, Craft and Community; Sarah Selecky’s Story is a State of Mind: Writing and the Art of Creative Curiosity and a forthcoming poetry collection, Goose, by Winnipeg author Melanie Dennis Unrau.

Suresh’s latest novel is a rich addition to Assembly’s emergent catalogue, as The Road Between Us builds on the momentum of her debut which introduced and established the author’s lyrical, spare style.

The Road Between Us is likewise beautifully written, a poetic, episodic page-turner that keeps you guessing to the very end.

Sara Harms is a Winnipeg editor.