• Book Cover: Saudade by Thomas Trofiumuk. On a purplish-blue background, a tarot card filled with small hints of the novel. Mountains, wine bottles, the face of Death hidden the pattern.

Saudade

by Thomas Trofimuk

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9781774391327 | April 2026 | 392 Pages

The sixth novel from award-winning writer Thomas Trofimuk. 


Bruce Flynn has long been overwhelmed by his unruly and alarming fear of death. His wife, Pilar, distracts him by telling him drawn-out and convoluted stories, hiding him behind so many twists and turns that even Death itself will not be able to find him. During one such story, while the couple is on holiday in Macon, France, Bruce becomes entirely engrossed in the tabletop as he listens to Pilar. When he looks up, she’s gone. Bruce looks for her, waits for her, interrogates the waiter, but she’s nowhere to be found. Bruce asks himself if this could be an elaborate prank – it’s the kind of trick Pilar loves – and he begins to see clues in the story she told. Saudade is a sweeping literary thriller, moving across Europe and North America, from France to Italy, to Palm Springs, and Lake Louise, showing a world on the cusp of a global pandemic. It is a love story, a story of stories, of loss, and of discovery.

"Death plays the piano. Breathtaking and brilliant. We need more novels like this: complex, ambitious tales that are both intimate and wholly original, and unafraid to tackle the Big Questions of life—and death. This is a tale of mirages and marriage, of lives caught between mirrors, of stories nested within stories, and a mystery at its core. A novel to savour."—WILL FERGUSON , Giller Prize-winning author of 419 


“A brilliantly crafted saga with intersecting, sometimes colliding narratives of yearning, mission, travel. Always poignant, often funny, never predictable. Full of self-contradictory moments that seem to make sense. Frequent appearances by a mystery woman in crimson stilettos. Another Trofimuk original.”—RONA ALTROWS, award-winning author of At This Juncture


“Thomas Trofimuk sheep-hooks readers into reality bending puzzles of Bruce Flynn’s missing wife, Pilar. As time collapses geographies, breathless multi-storied mysteries, questions, and hope collide. Characters, like Death, stalk and warp certainty of what we can survive and know about our own mortal fears, lost possibilities, longing, and love.”— Dr. Leah Fowler, author of Reading Canada


“Reading Saudade is like stepping into a Chagall painting with a panoply of wondrous acrobatic characters or opening a series of Russian nesting dolls to find fascinating layer upon layer of story. Trofimuk is a master of the puzzle narrative, a deft and poetic explorer of the ephemeral, enigmatic longing for a kernel of meaning at the heart of lives defined by time and loss.”—Gail Sidonie Šobat, award-winning author of Lessons from the Greeks


"Wow! What a read! A funhouse of story. Saudade is a romance like no other romance, a mystery like no other mystery. Hooked on this novel's Russian doll structure of clues within clues,  I remained fully immersed in its twisty world, from first page to last.  Only Thomas Trofimuk, as hilarious as he is clever, could write a story this playful  about grief, a story this life-affirming about death. A brilliant trip of a novel."—ANGIE ABDOU, award-winning author of The Bone Cage