Winner of the 2020 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour!

Aspiring novelist Molly MacGregor’s life is strikingly different from a literary heroine's. Named for one of literature’s least romantic protagonists, Moll Flanders, Molly lives in Edmonton, a city she finds irredeemably unromantic, where she writes university term papers instead of novels, and sells shoes in the Largest Mall on Earth. There she seeks the other half of her young life's own matched pair. Delightfully whimsical, Heidi L.M. Jacobs’ Molly of the Mall: Literary Lass and Purveyor of Fine Footwear explores its namesake's love for the written word, love for the wrong men (and the right one), and her complicated love for her city.

Heidi LM Jacobs was born and raised in Edmonton, AB. While completing her BA and MA in English at the University of Alberta, she worked in a wide variety of retail jobs, including selling shoes and clothes at West Edmonton Mall. After receiving a PhD in English from the University of Nebraska, she taught English in North Carolina. While living in the south, people repeatedly asked, "You aren't from around here, are you?", which inspired her to not only think about where she was from but to write about Edmonton as a place. Returning to Canada, she saw her country in new ways and took particular joy in reconnecting with Canadians' very particular kind of humour. She wrote the first drafts of Molly while teaching in Windsor, completing her Masters of Library and Information Science degree from the University of Western Ontario, and working as a librarian at the University of Windsor. In addition to researching and publishing widely in the areas of academic librarianship, Heidi is also working on a co-written, creative non-fiction book with Dale Jacobs, called 100 Miles of Baseball (forthcoming from Biblioasis Press in 2020) and a scholarly monograph about the 1934 Chatham Coloured All-Stars Baseball team, co-written with Miriam Wright (forthcoming from University of Waterloo Press in 2021).

Heidi Jacobs' profile page

• Winner, Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour

Praise for Molly of the Mall:
"[A] charming debut..."
~ Sarah Murdoch, Toronto Star
"I loved this novel."
~Kerry ClarePickle Me This
"Heidi L.M. Jacobs has created a delightfully whimsical protagonist in Molly. Always informed by the characters from literature she loves, she approaches life in her own unique, and fanciful, way. Such fun to follow the retail nightmares and romantic comedy mishaps of this Austenian heroine of mid-90s Edmonton."
~ Dina Del Bucchia, author of It's a Big Deal!
"Heidi L.M. Jacobs nails it. Molly of the Mall,/i> relentlessly, hilariously conveys the ennui felt by anyone who has ever read a book and then gone to the mall, just as it captures the malaise and pretension of every undergraduate English course ever. A rollicking literary romance set in the icy moonscape of 1990s Edmonton, Molly is wicked good fun."
~ Kit Dobson, author of Malled: Deciphering Shopping in Canada