Girlfriend on Mars

It's such a millennial love story. It's a world where breakups are performed online. It's seeing your ex move on and show off their fabulous new single life on social. Brunch with the girls on Insta, TikTok travel with the besties, and who is that guy that keeps showing up in the shots? Concert pics, wine tours, cottage fires — your ex living their best, unemcumbered, happy life while you're wallowing in your fort of pizza boxes, Cheetos and Mountain Dew.

Amplify that by a million - and now your girlfriend is living her dreams on national TV for all the see. Even if you know it's all fake, the book offering it's own clever skewering of reality TV, you can't help but take a little seriously the blossoming romance with the fellow show contestant Adam. This new relationship fueled by his muscular back and smug cheekbones being cheered on by legions of fans. And maybe you're not exactly making the best decisions coming to terms with the ending of the relationship either.

And there's the billionaire douchenozzle who cloaks his selfishness in pseudo spiritual language. His pet project to send humans to Mars is the best he can come up with to escape the slowly disintegrating planet that he and his shareholder friends and the politicians that live in their pockets have completely orchestrated.

It's also about the emotional scars that parents can leave and the outsized influence on what their adult children's relationships might end up looking like despite best efforts.

So it's love in the time of clicks and engagement that offers up a darkly funny mirror into our very online world. The Giller longlist once again pointing me in the direction of some wonderful new voices in Canadian literature.