Dance Floor Romance, Chris Tse, AUP, 2026
The Things We Never Say, Elizabeth Strout, Random House, 2026

My Labour Day plans to have a café phone catch up with Anna, assemble blogs for the week, and watch a few things, flew out the window when our area lost broadband for most of the day! My family was away at a wedding so I found myself doing something I have never done before – moving between two books: a poetry book, Chris Tse’s Dance Floor Romance and a novel, Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say, shortlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize. I couldn’t have made a better choice. These electrifying reads make mind-enhancing partners.

I will be posting a review conversation with Chris to celebrate his stunning book over the coming weeks but in the meantime check out ‘Search history’, a poem from the new collection, I managed to post early yesterday! It got so much love.

Let me share a few thoughts on the most incredible novel I have read in ages. I wanted to weep and sing and dance as I read. I am full of ice chill and I’m full of human warmth. The book is a symphony of wisdom and humanity and is, in my view, written by a woman with her finger on the pulse of the world.

I don’t want to spoil it for you by giving away the folds and surprises but I do want to say that this book reminds me to listen to the person next to me, to their ills and woes and loves, to listen to myself, to my ills and woes and loves, to remind myself what is good for our students, our families, our friends, our planet. And I am reminded — especially in the light of my multiple degrees in Italian — of how an insidious and evil leader can hijack a nation but how some people maintain vital forms of resistance.

I am reminded of the gaps in our knowledge – how important it is to connect with history, whether that of the world or of our kin – of how we need the stories of parents and grandparents and beyond. I mourn the gaps in understanding who and how my mother and father were.

The protagonist, Artie Dam, is one of my all time wow expand-my mind-and-heart characters – a history teacher, a father, husband, friend, a mesh of complications as we all are . . . a meeting ground of jagged edges and healing grace. The tears are welling again as I write these lines.

I love this book so much. I love that it speaks not preaches, that it shows the simple within the complicated, the complicated within the simple. I have placed it on the table for my family to read because this book is a gift of hope. It is a gift of connection and listening and upholding ways to do good and yes it furnished the best Labour Day I have had in years.