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.
"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."--
