The Road Between Us by Bindu Suresh

A snapshot of each part of an interconnected set of people and the decisions they made which hurt each other – some directly, some more obliquely – The Road Between Us by Bindu Suresh is compulsively readable. I inhaled all of the different sections, completely engrossed by the characters and links that Suresh has created here. There are loads of tough and subtle lesson in Suresh’s book, but most of all, The Road Between Us is a complicated tangle of people and the ways that they cross paths through time, some more damaging than others.

I wouldn’t call this an optimistic book by any stretch – most of the events of the characters’ lives are marked by traumatic events (content warning for the novel: there’s significant discussion of grooming, rape, and other assault), and they spend their sections trying to, in their own ways, move past them. The novel starts with Estela, now in her mid to late thirties, calling up her estranged friend Ash to see if he’ll back up her statement about the professor she had an affair with in her undergrad, an affair that ended poorly and changed the course of her life. Through subsequent sections, we hear from Allister, Estela’s partner; Ash himself; Sasha, Ash’s boyfriend; Ophélie, Ash’s former girlfriend; Naomi, a former student and second wife of the professor Estela had an affair with; Roman, the professor; and Kate, Roman’s first wife. As each section unfolds with the story of the titular character, we also learn more of the stories that previous characters told, seeing the missing pieces and the other sides.

Suresh’s novel is full of morally grey behaviour and each character has trauma and reasoning for their actions, despite the aftermath for each one, and the reverberations across decades. As someone who loves a big picture, and seeing the linkages that exist, this was a novel tailored for me. Suresh’s prose is spare, and the way that the novel is broken up – character sections, and then each scene in each section broken on the page – worked incredibly well for sinking into each story.

There are no neat endings for any of the characters that Suresh created here. The Road Between Us explores connection, but more importantly, it explores the ambiguity of the human experience. We do things that we regret, and we have more power to affect the others in our lives than we think we do. I came to the end of the novel reminded of this, and will spend more time thinking about Estela, Roman, Ash, Sasha, Naomi and the rest of the characters beyond what Suresh shared about them here, because it was such an impressively fleshed-out group of people. Despite the sections divided by character, this was a very full and fluid story.

Bindu Suresh is a fiction writer and paediatrician based in Montreal. Her debut book was 26 Knots. She studied literature at Columbia University and medicine at McGill University. CBC Books named Suresh a writer to watch in 2019.

Publisher: Assembly Press (May 13th, 2025)
Paperback: 8″ x 6″ | 258 pp
ISBN: 9781998336173

Alison Manley

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Alison Manley has ricocheted between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia for most of her life. Now in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she is the Cataloguing and Metadata Librarian at Saint Mary's University. Her past life includes a long stint as a hospital librarian on the banks of the mighty Miramichi River. She has an honours BA in political science and English from St. Francis Xavier University, and a Master of Library and Information Studies from Dalhousie University. While she's adamant that her love of reading has nothing to do with her work, her ability to consume large amounts of information very quickly sure is helpful. She is often identified by her very red lipstick, and lives with her partner Brett and cat, Toasted Marshmallow.