What Endures by Pauline Holdstock | The Miramichi Reader

What struck me at the end of reading the collection of short stories that every single one was true. And I mean true in the sense that Pauline Holdstock captured the very essence of how people act and live, even in the dysfunctional and broken moments of their lives. What Endures is a series of tales about the world that we live in now, and how we push our way through it, even in the darkest of times. Dark can be a relative term in these stories: sometimes, it’s a moment of hilarity which reveals the baggage that a person is carrying around.

Dark can be a relative term in these stories: sometimes, it’s a moment of hilarity which reveals the baggage that a person is carrying around.

Some of these stories are loosely linked; at least, I read them that way, with their overlapping names and a few details that lined up, but it’s not an essential part of the collection, mostly just something kind of interesting. As is the wide variety of characters and stories in this collection: ranging from the brutal Merv and Bri in “Spot,” who deal with each other and an unwanted dog, to Vita, a woman heading into a dangerous brain surgery and living with a surprising amount of joy. In “Perfect Beauty,” Holdstock tells us about Camilla, a woman who tries a new beauty regimen to restore the beauty of her youth, and finds herself rapidly aging in reverse, to the distress of her adult daughter. While I’ve read dozens of satirical stories critiquing Western beauty standards, this was a more interesting angle on the critique and a well-written thought experiment on demanding youth from women.

This is not a volume of great heft but Holdstock manages to pack her stories with a lot of heavy work. Not necessarily sad, because even though the collection does tend toward the side of grim, there’s a lot of joy in here too. But What Endures is a collection of stories that does ask you to sit with them, to really think about the world that they’re exploring, and to pull apart the questions Holdstock is asking in each story. What are we doing here? How do we manage this world?

What Endures doesn’t promise answers to the questions it poses, but it does give you the sense that you aren’t the only one thinking about them, and we’re all doing our best with what we have. Even the story of “The Five-Barred Gate,” a tale about nuns at a dying abbey has this same thread woven through it, though it at first seems a bit of a departure from the other stories. I suspect I’ll be revisiting this collection, just because of how it’s haunted me since I finished it. A small, slightly unsettling but also kind of fun read for your fall, which sounds convoluted but matches September perfectly.

Pauline Holdstock is an internationally published novelist, short fiction writer, and essayist. Her novels have been shortlisted for a number of awards, among them the Best First Novel Award, the Giller Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Her novel Beyond Measure was the winner of the BC Book Prizes Ethel Wilson Award for Fiction. Her novels The Hunter and the Wild Girl and Confessions With Keith have each been awarded the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize.

Publisher: Biblioasis (August 18, 2026)
Paperback: 5.25″ x 8.25″ | 280 pages
ISBN: 9781771967174

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.