The Globe and Mail Best Books of 2025
Between writing a weekly column for The Hype Report and managing her mood stabilizers, Gloria navigates a series of quasi-relationships while commiserating with her best friend about dating apps and dick pics, married men and questionable boundaries. But when she makes a glib pass at Daryn, a stranger on a subway platform crowded with young anti-immigration protesters, and finds him waiting for her outside her health club a couple of days later, a surprising curiosity leads her not to consider a restraining order, but to talk to him.
Claiming she wants to interview him for an article on the incel movement, Gloria meets Daryn for coffee and soon invites him back to her apartment—where his earnestness and painfully restrained desire inspire her to dominate him sexually. As their physical relationship intensifies, so does their emotional connection, and Gloria can’t shake the sense that she’s headed in a dangerous direction.
An electric examination of sex and love, self-loathing, and twenty-first century loneliness, Self Care is a devastating novel about women and men, what they want and what they say they want, and the violent tension between the two.
“Smith’s bleak, horny comedy holds up a funhouse mirror to an aspect of the human condition that feels unique but has always endured: What do we owe others, and why is there something so funny in the tragedy of our constant failure to connect? While there are no satisfying answers provided in Smith’s novel (nor in any novel), there is an undeniably stylish brutality to his portrait of desperately lonely urbanites; when it hits you, you just might laugh.”
—Emily M. Keeler, Globe and Mail
“Beautifully written, patient and eloquent, sober in its insights and its humanism. Adult fiction for adults, neither cool nor hot, currying no favors, seeking only to succeed as art.”
—Charles Foran, author of Just One, No More
“A perverse, bleak, often hilarious Romeo-and-Juliet tale for our cultural moment. Smith renders the self-obsessed urban landscape with absolute precision.”
—Mark Kingwell, author of Question Authority: A Polemic About Trust in Five Meditations
“A gripping, unforgettable story about a young journalist and her secret incel lover that explodes the fairy tale of the frog prince. It had me sitting on the edge of my seat.”
—Susan Swan, author of Big Girls Don’t Cry