Variations on a Dream

From the Giller-shortlisted author of Glorious Frazzled Beings comes a beguiling debut novel humming with sensuality, intelligence, and a tinge of the absurd.

After years of shouldering the childcare and housework, trying to keep her creative life and career alive, and managing her husband’s existential anxieties, the once whimsical Sarah is too burned out to dream. Most days, all she can muster is an imaginary, picture-perfect version of her husband Trevor. Meanwhile, Trevor is caught in a downward spiral of his own: strangled by fear of artistic mediocrity, and lonely and disconnected from his family, he fantasizes about the early college days when his romance with Sarah still thrilled with expansive, seductive possibility.

When both Sarah and Trevor secretly stumble on an auteur porn film based on the ancient Greek myth of Ariadne, they are immediately sucked into a dizzying maze of obsession, betrayal, possession, and duplicate selves echoing backwards in time. As the lines between fantasy, reality, and dream become increasingly blurred, a brilliant, alluring new student arrives in Trevor's university class—threatening to collapse the walls of their mythology forever.

With startling psychological insight, a sly sense of humour, and all the peculiar twists of a fairytale, Variations on a Dream is a fearless exploration of how far we will go to save what we once believed to be a dream come true.