At Sea in a Sieve: A Novel

by Cordelia Strube

Ray, a single mother and superior court judge, pounds a punching bag in her basement to manage her anger. She has concluded that life must be lived tightly leashed or chaos will move in. Her prime directive is to protect her daughter, Armada, from life’s unruly forces. Ray deftly handles other people’s problems, managing her courtroom and the politics of the judges’ chambers, and defusing her neighbors’ battles, all the while staying above the fray. But when her feckless, sweet brother re-enters Ray’s life, bringing unpredictability and wayward emotion with him, and her sexy, but enervating Guatemalan ex crashes into her world, she realizes that her carefully piloted ship is not watertight after all — it’s no better than a sieve. Cascading events reveal to Ray that suffering cannot be held at bay and that life must be lived in all its messy glory.


Peopled with a cast of characters for the ages, from the eccentrics that surround Ray’s courtroom and her street to a flock of recalcitrant hens, and laden with her trademark sly wit, this is Strube’s best novel yet — sharp, intensely humane, moving, and funny.

Kindle Edition

Expected publication June 16, 2026

About the author

Read an interview and an excerpt of Cordelia's new novel, On the Shores of Darkness, There Is Light, in Numéro Cinq Magazine: http://goo.gl/9KOheD

Watch a video of Cordelia interacting with students at York University's Canadian Writers in Person here: https://youtu.be/7548Yv5E5qI

Cordelia Strube is an accomplished playwright and the author of nine critically acclaimed novels, including Alex & Zee, Teaching Pigs to Sing, and Lemon. Winner of the CBC literary competition and a Toronto Arts Foundation Award, she has been nominated for the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Book Award, the WH Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award, and the Prix Italia, and longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Strube is a two-time finalist for ACTRA’s Nellie Award celebrating excellence in Canadian broadcasting and a three-time nominee for the ReLit Award. She lives in Toronto.

Reviews

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cordelia Strube’s “At Sea in a Sieve” begins with a premise that could have been handled as a familiar contemporary escape narrative – a burned-out professional, a tense family situation, a flight to elsewhere – and then refuses nearly every comforting convention that premise tends to invite. Instead of reinvention, we get recalibration. Instead of catharsis, we get weather. Instead of a neat arc, we get the slow, stubborn metabolizing of grief, guilt, and the unglamorous labor of staying alive for a child.

Ray, a Canadian judge and single mother, arrives in rural Portugal with her daughter, Armada, and almost immediately the novel reveals its true subject: not the romance of exile, but the mind that cannot stop governing itself. Ray is the kind of person who has built a life on vigilance and control – a woman who can manage a courtroom but cannot always manage her own inner noise. In Toronto, she presides over human wreckage with the ritualized distance of the bench; in Portugal, she is confronted with different rituals, different wreckage, different forms of witness. The move does not fix her. It complicates her.

Strube is unusually good at the comedy of complication. There are mutts that bark through the night like a chorus of unresolved grievances. There is Mafalda, the crucifix-clutching grandmother whose “fifty-fifty” operates like a philosophy, a shrug, a verdict. There is Filipe – playwright, drummer, scab-picker, nihilist – who turns dinner into a seminar on atrocity and entertainment, and whose grotesque theatrical imagination seems only a notch removed from the daily headlines. There is a donkey, Artur, who inserts his head through the window each morning like an emissary of appetite and grace. And there are the chickens: neglected, hierarchized, oddly prehistoric – absurd and, eventually, essential.

In less disciplined hands, this menagerie could become quaint, a pastoral balm. Strube won’t allow that. The animals are not decorative; they are a moral instrument. Ray’s attention to the henhouse – its filth, its pecking order, its lack of ventilation, its vulnerability to predators – becomes a form of grounded ethics, a rebuke to a life spent abstracting human suffering into procedure. If courts are where society performs its ideals, the coop is where life performs its needs. Cleaning it is not a metaphor; it is also a metaphor. The point is not that Ray finds herself by tending to chickens. The point is that tending to chickens demands a kind of presence that her previous life continually trained out of her.

That training – the professional habituation to crisis – is one of the novel’s quietly devastating portraits. Ray’s voice is brisk, mordant, self-aware, and occasionally ruthless, the voice of someone who has survived by preempting disappointment. She is allergic to the consolations people expect from grief narratives: she will not become inspirational on cue, and she has little patience for the social media gloss that now coats even catastrophe. When her father lectures her, she imagines him straightening pictures that remain askew. It is a perfect image for the book’s larger diagnosis: the compulsive straightening of life, the belief that enough adjustments can ward off the rot.

And rot, here, is not merely personal. “At Sea in a Sieve” is threaded with the pressure of our era’s ambient crises – the sense that systems are failing at scale, that the rich are getting grotesquely rich, that the planet is burning and drowning, that the human appetite for spectacle has simply migrated from amphitheaters to screens. Filipe’s riffs about Romans feeding slaves to lions, reality television, and the entertainment of cruelty land with an ugly familiarity. When he describes a play in which the “grotesquely rich” farm the poor for gut bacteria, the satire is not far-fetched in a world newly obsessed with microbiomes and increasingly resigned to inequality as a natural order. The novel’s brilliance is that it doesn’t need to sermonize; it places these thoughts in the mouth of a man who is both clown and prophet, then lets Ray – trained in judgment, skeptical of prophecy – weigh them.

Strube’s sentences have a playwright’s ear for timing, for the swerve from the philosophical to the profane. Ray can move from Aristotle’s “eudaimonia” to chicken shit without blinking, and the proximity is the point. The book keeps asking: What does a moral life look like when the self will not stop narrating? When grief corrodes attention? When certainty – political, familial, personal – feels like a luxury or a trap? Ray is a reader, a list-maker, a chronic annotator of her own existence. She reaches for Kant, Hume, Murdoch, Emerson, Nietzsche, Wordsworth – not as status markers, but as handholds, a private rope flung between her and the world. Yet even here, Strube is too sharp to indulge the fantasy that ideas rescue us. They can illuminate. They can also become another form of control.

There is a deep honesty in the way “At Sea in a Sieve” portrays the intellectual as a coping style. Ray’s mind is not a villain; it is a well-intentioned paranoid friend, warning her of everything that can go wrong. She has built a life on anticipatory dread and calls it responsibility. She has spent decades trying to be unseen to avoid rejection and calls it prudence. She is, in other words, a recognizable creature of the modern professional class: competent, exhausted, privately panicked, and always one step away from asking whether her work is meaningful or merely functional. Strube does not caricature that condition. She anatomizes it with an almost forensic sympathy.

That forensic sympathy extends to the book’s most harrowing material. Without turning the novel into a procedural, Strube includes enough of Ray’s judicial life to make clear how violence and vulnerability pool in the corners of a city. The law, in this book, is not a clean instrument; it is a flawed system that tries to manage human mess with categories and consequences. Ray is not naïve about that. She is also not sanctimonious. She understands, at a granular level, that vice and virtue live in every human heart, that “bad people” is a lazy phrase, that punishment rarely resembles justice. Her skepticism toward incarceration – and her acute awareness of solitary confinement as a special kind of psychic torture – gives the book a contemporary bite without making it a tract. It is impossible to read the sections involving prison, surveillance paranoia, and mental health without hearing echoes of current debates about carceral policy, institutional cruelty, and the thinness of the line between “help” and control.

Then the novel does something riskier: it forces Ray’s private story to collide with irreversible loss.

Forest – Ray’s brother, a chaotic, possibly dangerous, often charismatic orbiting body – has been in the background as a source of fear and obligation, the kind of family problem that consumes entire adult lives. Strube refuses to make him a tidy villain or a tidy victim. He is self-destructive and magnetic, capable of beauty (a watercolor of Armada titled “The Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me Was an Accident”) and also capable of harm. He is also, crucially, part of the story Ray tells herself about who she must be: the warden sister, the supervisor, the one who keeps the madman from burning the house down.

When that role is annihilated by his death, Ray’s grief is not only grief for him. It is grief for a lifelong posture, grief for the fantasy that control equals safety. The pages following the news of his suicide are among the book’s most powerful: bodily, unpretty, and terrifyingly unsentimental. Strube writes grief as convulsion, as weather, as the collapse of time’s ordinary scale. Ray can’t eat. She performs chores in a stupor. Her child feels unreachable. She can’t scream inside the house. She crawls outside, sobbing into the grass with a skinned cat’s pelt under her hand – an image so grotesque it becomes, paradoxically, truthful. No tasteful metaphor would suffice. Grief is not tasteful.

This is where Strube’s tonal mastery shows. The book’s intelligence never deserts it, but it does not use intelligence as a shield. The philosophical citations – Pascal, Freud, Jung, Murdoch – do not prettify the event; they shadow it, like thoughts one tries on and then discards because none can fully contain what has happened. The novel permits contradiction: Ray can hate Forest for leaving her and still long for her father’s embrace; she can feel guilt and still feel relief; she can despise her father and still want him to behave like a father. In an era that often demands clean moral positions, Strube offers the messier, rarer thing: psychological truth.

It would be easy, at this point, for the book to sell redemption. It doesn’t. What it offers instead is something harder and more credible: attention.

The Portuguese village, with its “museum pieces on wheels,” its smock aprons and fanny packs, its acceptance of an old vet carrying a machete with his fly unzipped, becomes not a utopia but an alternative scale of life. Ray starts to experience the strange relief of being a small figure in a larger landscape – not the center, not the manager, not the judge. She begins to broker peace between Mafalda and Silva not through grand moral argument but through oranges, gestures, and the humble physicality of moving rocks back into place. Meaning does not arrive as revelation. It arrives as “right action,” as the narcotic satisfaction of something repaired.

And then, with wicked simplicity, an egg appears.

Dorrit – the bullied hen Ray named after Dickens’s “Little Dorrit,” the bottom girl who perched on a shovel handle, the one who finally jumped into Ray’s lap when the others fled – lays an egg at the moment Ray makes a quiet vow to keep living for Armada. The symbolism could have been heavy-handed. Strube earns it by refusing to make it miraculous. The egg is not a cure. It is evidence that care has consequences, that attention can coax life into offering something back, that the world contains small answers even when it refuses the big ones.

As a piece of literary architecture, “At Sea in a Sieve” belongs to a lineage of novels that blend moral inquiry with dark comedy and a fierce commitment to interior life. One feels affinities with the unsparing maternal clarity of “Dept. of Speculation,” the intellectual restlessness and social bite of “Outline,” the institutional unease of “Severance,” the rural recalibration and grief-weather of “H is for Hawk,” and the mordant domestic precision of “Sorrow and Bliss.” There are also echoes of “The Friend,” in the way an animal presence becomes both ballast and mirror, and of “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead,” in the book’s wry insistence that the nonhuman world is not a backdrop but an interlocutor. Yet Strube’s novel remains distinct: more abrasive than consoling, more comedic than bleak, less invested in plot than in pressure.

If the book falls short of greatness – and it occasionally does – it is largely because Strube sometimes trusts her reader a fraction too little. Certain philosophical passages overexplain what the scene has already conveyed. A tighter edit could have trimmed some recurrences without sacrificing the cumulative hypnosis that the novel otherwise achieves. At moments, the voice’s very control – that brisk, literate, self-correcting intelligence – can feel like a closed circuit, a mind narrating its way around pain rather than through it. But these are not fatal flaws; they are the costs of the book’s method. Ray’s mind is repetitive because grief is repetitive, because anxiety is repetitive, because the stories we tell ourselves return like dogs barking in the night.

The larger achievement is that Strube has written a novel that feels deeply of the moment without pandering to it. Its current-event resonance is embedded rather than announced: the dread of climate collapse, the exhaustion of systems, the widening gap between rich and poor, the hunger for spectacle, the slipperiness of certainty, the way social media substitutes for kinship, the moral confusion of institutions that claim to protect. The book’s relevance is not topical. It is atmospheric. It recognizes the contemporary condition as a kind of low-grade emergency – and asks, with grim humor and real compassion, how one might live without turning that emergency into an identity.

In the end, “At Sea in a Sieve” is not a book about escape. It is a book about scale: the scale of a life narrowed by fear, the scale of grief expanding to fill an entire body, the scale of attention that makes a day survivable, the scale of the universe that renders our certainties temporarily ridiculous. Ray learns, imperfectly, to stop straightening the pictures. She learns to tolerate uncertainty without converting it into delusion. She learns – in flashes, not permanently – to unself, to be water, to slip around the obstacles her mind places before her.

That the novel can hold all of this – the philosophical, the profane, the maternal, the institutional, the animal, the apocalyptic – and still end on the plain miracle of an egg is a testament to Strube’s craft. This is a bracing, mordantly funny, morally intelligent novel that refuses cheap solace yet still permits a reader to feel, by the final pages, that meaning is not something one finds once and keeps – it is something one practices, like juggling, like cleaning a coop, like learning again and again how to stay.

Rating: 89/100.