Iris and the Dead by Miranda Schreiber

Book*hug, 2025.

A diary stripped of all secrecy, the novel Iris and the Dead reads like a scrawled confession of the heart’s greatest crime: love. Manacled with atypical depression, our young narrator teeters, finally, on the mesa of euphoria; after eighteen years of wandering through a fleering fog, she falls gracelessly in love with her counsellor from whom she initially seems worlds apart. Yet as their professional relationship unfolds, the two women prove more similar in their interests and principles than may be appropriate. Schreiber’s novel highlights how love grasps at us all, and how the veristic stock of finite gratification calls to us like the promise of eternal life just beyond the lip of the abyss.

– Dani Arieli, Oakville