Description: "At 49, Beatrice Billings is rudderless. Her marriage is stale, her relationship with her son Thomas is limited to text messages--hostile haikus that he sends from university--and she is the primary caregiver for her mother, who is in the early stages of dementia. She has a complicated relationship with her older sister Ariel, with whom she carries on ongoing arguments in her head. Bea laments the loss of momentum she remembers feeling in her thirties, when she and everyone she knew was busy buying houses, having children, and renovating kitchens. Now she is reflecting on her life, worried about her inability to memorize a simple yoga sequence, and about the fact that she enjoys the idea of many things more than the actual things themselves (teaching, reading, sex). When Bea finds that she has both a talent and a passion for picking locks, the sense of anticipation that had been missing from her life returns. Breaking into other people's houses is something she's good at: she is a quick study, subtle, discreet, and never greedy. It's a dangerous hobby that makes her feel alive--and so she begins the guilty analysis of other people's lives, and eventually, her own."--
Brief description:
Don Gillmor is the author of To the River, which won the Governor General's Award for nonfiction. He is the author of three novels, Long Change, Mount Pleasant, and Kanata, a two-volume history of Canada, Canada: A People's History, and nine books for children, two of which were nominated for the Governor General's Award. He was a senior editor at The Walrus, and his journalism has appeared in Rolling Stone, GQ, The Walrus, Saturday Night, Toronto Life, the Globe and Mail, and the Toronto Star. He has won twelve National Magazine Awards and numerous other honours. He lives in Toronto.
Review Quotes:
Praise for Breaking and Entering
"In a quiet story that takes place over only a few summer months, the Canadian author deftly converges doubt, infidelity and the fragility of family in a narrative that is both thrilling and relatable."
-New York Times
"Surely the most interesting midlife crisis of the year."
--Marion Winik, Oprah Daily
"Knowledge is mostly sadness in this intelligent ... book: No matter where Bea breaks in, she keeps finding herself."
--Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
"Gillmor succeeds at pulling you into the hopes, dreams, expectations, desires, anxieties and pathologies of his characters ... Like jazz, the moments of tension in the book give away to moments of relief, only to return to building tension once more ... reading it will strike a chord."
--David Moscorp, Globe and Mail
"Hilarious and devastating."
--Globe and Mail
"Bea (is) ... a powerfully drawn character ... Every aspect of the novel feels true. Her relationship ... is not only closely (almost clinically) observed, but also deeply felt, lived in. That balance, between critical distance and emotional immersion, lends the novel a powerful verisimilitude."
--Toronto Star
"The genius of this book is to capture the exact way a familiar world of aging parents and divorcing friends and nice charcuterie platters could go right around the bend. ... A smart, funny, and sneakily terrifying version of the way we live now. (Do not read without working air conditioning.)"
--Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
"Gillmor is adept at capturing the zeitgeist with sweeping brush strokes and vivid references."
--Literary Review of Canada
"A searing tale of midlife, the need to be seen, and how easy it is to lose oneself by slow degrees, Breaking and Entering is written with Gillmor's trademark power and insight, a novel of depth and painful truths filtered through strikingly rendered characters."
--Open Book
"Breaking and Entering is a character study of a privileged woman in mid life who is challenged with finding meaning in a world on the brink of collapse ... Yet Gillmor suffuses the book with humanity and humour ... This is a thoughtful, entertaining, and beautifully written novel."
--Glenda MacFarlane, The Bridge
"The novel follows main character Bea's path in the world of amateur lock picking through a story that includes family drama, the hottest summer in Toronto's history, a mid-life crisis and a Google search."
--Devon Banfield, Now Toronto
"Breaking and Entering is a red-hot novel, sweaty and sexy, that pulls off a complex three-way analogy between the unsustainability of intimacy, our increasingly unlivable and volatile climate, and the coy seduction of caressing a lock until it eases open. Unsurprisingly, Bea's perverse thrill at being an invisible intruder slides into voyeurism, creating an amusing interplay where she, the readers, and the author are all complicit in the desire to probe into the lives of strangers."
--McGill Tribune
"Gillmor is a skilled writer."
--Winnipeg Free Press
"While we don't recommend stealing, we do recommend living vicariously through Bea's sticky fingers."
--Zoomer
"A good read."
--The Miramichi Reader
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