The Road Between Us

by Bindu Suresh

Longlisted for the 2025 Giller Prize


As binge-worthy as a miniseries, this lover's knot of a novel delves into the entangled lives of its ensemble cast.



Estela struggles in her relationships and in her professional life due to the loss of her brother at a young age. Ash, Estela’s estranged best friend, loves Estela unrequitedly and must come to terms with being bisexual in the context of his traditional Indian immigrant family. Ophélie works through PTSD and the emotionally abusive romantic relationship she was in as a teen. Roman is an academic whose pain post-divorce leads him to seek out younger women—his students—in the #MeToo era.



In her signature spare, poetic style, Bindu Suresh unfurls their lives and the relationships that drive them together and tear them apart. Travelling from Montreal to Ottawa to Toronto – and as far as New York, Beijing, and Buenos Aires – and spanning the first two decades of the twenty-first century, The Road Between Us is an episodic novel that explores why we make the decisions we do and the effects those decisions have on the people we love.

Genres: Canada, Literary Fiction

249 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 27, 2025

About the author

A former journalist and current paediatrician, Bindu Suresh is the author of short stories that have appeared in various literary publications. She studied literature at Columbia University and medicine at McGill University. Born in Wales, she grew up in Canada and has spent equal parts of her life in Saskatchewan, Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec. She currently lives in Montreal.

Reviews

[Kelly (The Happiest Little Book Club) · Rating 4 out of 5]

My Rating: 4.5/5

Review to come, but I genuinely loved it.

[Vicky Siffy · Rating 4 out of 5]

chapters were quick, no fluff - great if you have a tiktok attention span

the author did a good job of portraying how all our decisions are interwoven, how they affect those around us

also idk what i was expecting for the ending but i did not see that coming

[Rebekah · Rating 3 out of 5]

*3.5 ⭐️

The writing was sometimes hard to follow & there were way too many characters, that it was hard to remember who we had met & where. BUT I absolutely loved how all the characters intertwined even if it wasn’t directly. Everything in some way being connected was brilliant! Also that ending was insane. Beautiful book

[Renay Russell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting short read. There are two main characters, but then we get chapters about the people connecting to the main characters to get a more fulsome view of the story.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this. It doesn’t tell you what to think of the characters. It presents them as they are and allows you to draw your own conclusions.

[Paulina Simon Torres · Rating 4 out of 5]

Estaba leyendo solamente Non Fiction, pero me gustó el título y la portada de esta novela y otra vez, es una escritora canadiense y en nigún lado dice New York Times Best Seller (qué últimamente me condiciona a pensar que es el sello de todo "fast food read").

Disfruté mucho de esta novela, a los tiempos leer algo así, los vínculos entre parejas y cómo sus vidas se entrecruzan de ciudad a ciudad y de generación a generación. Me recordó a la serie de Big Little Lies (no he leído el libro). Cómo el hilo de cada personaje se va combinando con los demás y es un descubrimiento lento, con cierto suspenso, a medida que avanza la trama.

Lo que me gustó de esta novela es que siento que a pesar de que son muchos personajes, siento que puedo entender la sicología de cada uno. No es una descripción profunda (son muchos personajes), pero siento que la autora captura su esencia.

Siento que es una novela casi escrita para televisión (digamos, para serie o miniserie de Netflix). Con el casting adecuado, sería un buen audiovisual, con el nivel adecuado de profundidad.

Cómo una persona que ha vivido en una relación monogámica desde hace 16 años me resultan intensas las experiencias de estas parejas y la complejidad del amor, las relaciones, el pasaje entre la ruptura del corazón y la siguiente etapa y todas las etapas intermedias. Doloroso.

[Mike Broderick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to Edelweiss and Assembly Press for an advance copy of this book.
Something………something made me enjoy this. It was short, some pages were not full.
It wasn’t tremendously fast moving.
However, it was very well written. It is real. It’s about relationships.
I would defy anyone to not consider their own lives when reading the story.
The way she creates an interwoven nature of the relationships was very well done. Throughout, the reader had to suspend their expectations of chronological story telling. However, it worked very well.

With the interweaving of stories, there is a lot going on, so more meat would have helped. Having said that, I really appreciated that she didn’t feel like she had to spell everything out…..she allowed us to use our inferencing skills. Also, we didn’t get bogged down with details that are immaterial to the plot.

I loved how this story is truly Canadian, even though it does “span decades and continents.” The constant relationships stemming from McGill reminded me of my University days.

[Emer O'Toole · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Koenig's term "sonder" describes a heightened sense of the fact that everyone has a complex internal life that they are experiencing as vividly as you are yours. The Road Between Us is a sonderous novel.

In each chapter, a secondary or side character steps centre stage. We come to know each deeply - their losses, wounds, loves, and dreams - and to see the story differently from their perspective. With an impressive sleight of hand, Suresh leaves the reader to fit puzzle pieces together, gifting us satisfying "ah-ha" moments at the end.

Given how little time I spent with each character, its extraordinary how much I cared about their journeys. I think this is partly down to the elegant, unpretentious prose, which offers crafted vignettes rather than complete narratives, often erring on the side of poetry - it allows an image, a line of dialogue to tug the heart. It's also maybe because this novel is about life's big questions - about having children, about how to grieve, about love and commitment, what constitutes abuse. And I care about the characters' ever-changing answers to those questions, because I care about my own.

A beautiful book, and a literary achievement.

[Enid Wray · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is quite a lovely piece of writing - as was her debut 26 Knots.

Sadly though this is too big in scope, too disjointed in the telling, and not near enough in the content department for my liking.

This title - which truly does span “continents and decades” - clocks in at a grand total of 252 pages - all in!! - and ever so many of those pages have little more than a few lines of text on them.

I appreciate that, sometimes, less is more and that as much can be said in the voids as in the text itself. This is not one of those cases. Here, less is just too little. There is not enough meat here. The scope of this is far too large to allow for there to be so little conveyed. I feel entirely unsatisfied - unsatiated - upon finishing this one…

I’ll read her again - but I’m not liking the odds that her prose is going to continue to be anything less than sparse.

Thanks to the publisher and Edelweiss for granting me access to an early digital review copy.

[Rick · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed the episodic style of this book, the way the pieces fall into place to reveal connections and motivations previously obscured. It's efficient and effective. I liked not getting bogged down in detailed descriptions of mundane settings and events that do nothing to move the plot forward. And yet it never felt sparse to me; each page, whether full of text or a single paragraph, resonated, which I think few writers could pull of so well. This is propulsive storytelling that made me reach for Suresh's previous novella, 26 Knots, for my next read.

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

*** | 3 stars

I usually really appreciate a novel that ever so slightly interweaves characters, but for some reason, this book just didn’t hold my attention. Prose was very good, chapters were short, but it still took me a week to find the time to finish it. Lovely but not necessarily one that will be memorable for me.

[Caro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every storyline in this novel held my attention, and the way they were all beautifully woven together is a reminder of how connected we all are. I feel like it’s very down to earth and realistic (and perhaps should come with a trigger warning for SA), tough, yet hopeful. I would highly recommend!

[Carol Stevenson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to say that I felt like someone spying on the characters and their private lives. Bindi Suresh did a great job of building the characters so I felt like I knew them and was curious about what would happen to them.

[Dawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great story, the sameish time frames but told through overlapping people's perspectives. If the last chapter could have been ignored, I would have liked it more. It was just irritating to again have another story revolve around sexual assault.

[Jocelyn Martinez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fast and “easy” read, I loved the author’s writing style, many interesting (some heavy) topics
My favourite part was that it was Canadian and referenced many Canadian locations and post secondary schools!

[Chrissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wish it was longer, which is always a good sign

[Darlene Drouillard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow, this was really different, but really enjoyed it

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent. A handful of characters in what could have been a love story. Each has a chapter and the story moves flawlessly. Recommend

[Melanie Mortenson · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. I really enjoyed her writing, however, there were too many characters for my liking. It felt disjointed and confusing.

[Kennedy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible.

[Sierra · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF.

[WENDY MACLAURIN · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this book.