Breaking and Entering
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness US and Canada Prize • An Oprah Daily Best Book of 2023 • One of the Globe and Mail's Most Anticipated Titles of 2023 • Listed in CBC Books Fiction to Read in Fall 2023 • A 49th Shelf Fall Book To Put On Your List • One of the Globe 100's Best Books of 2023
During the hottest summer on record, Bea's dangerous new hobby puts everyone's sense of security to the test.
Forty-nine and sweating through the hottest summer on record, Beatrice Billings is rudderless: her marriage is stale, her son communicates solely through cryptic text messages, her mother has dementia, and she conducts endless arguments with her older sister in her head. Toronto feels like an inadequately air-conditioned museum of its former self, and the same could be said of her life. She dreams of the past, her days as a newlywed, a new mom, a new homeowner gutting the kitchen—now the only novel experience that looms is the threat of divorce.
Everything changes when she googles "escape" and discovers the world of amateur lock-picking. Breaking into houses is thrilling: she’s subtle and discreet, never greedy, but as her curiosity about other people’s lives becomes a dangerous compulsion and the entire city feels a few degrees from boiling over, she realizes she must turn her guilty analysis on herself. A searingly insightful rendering of midlife among the anxieties of the early twenty-first century, Breaking and Entering is an exacting look at the fragility of all the things we take on faith.
Customer Reviews
Hot summer nights
3.5 stars
Canadian journalist and novelist Gillmor is well known in his native country, although not to me previously.
Bea is a fiftyish white woman with an art history degree who runs a small gallery in Toronto. Husband Sanger (not a name I’d run across before) teaches history at university. Son Tom is away at uni in Montreal. Bea and Sanger and their social peer group battle ennui during the hottest summer in living memory for the Canucks. Most resort to that old faithful: infidelity. Our gal does too eventually, but before that, she learns how to pick locks and starts breaking into other people’s homes, as you would. She doesn’t rob them, apart from one expensive dress. She’s more interested in conjuring up impressions of their lives based on the contents of their dwellings then judging them, as you do. She and hubby split up for a while but get back together by the end, when the ambient temperature starts to fall.
The writing is spare, with plenty of funny lines as our gal passes judgement on all and sundry. The pacing is consistent with the torpid weather. The author has attracted predictable criticism in certain sectors for presuming to write about a woman’s middle aged ennui when he’s a man, to which I say: no comment. I think he deserves credit for the slightly novel twist on a familiar subject in literature. Pity he didn’t do more with it. Too hot, probably.