Long-listed for the ReLit Award, 2009
Reese Larkin is desperate to find the perfect mattress. His job is in jeopardy and he’s been forced to separate from his wife and children, but he believes that if he can find the ultimate sleep system his life will begin anew.
In her seventh novel, Cordelia Strube grabs readers by the neuroses with a dark but wickedly fun story about a former Greenpeace activist forced to turn marketeer who battles against a world in which he is confronted by shift mattress sales clerks, a Fred and Ginger-obsessed strip-bar waitress, derisive colleagues, and a wife who has mysteriously turned cold and is keeping his children from him. Alone in his damp basement apartment with his daughter’s hamster, he longs for a good night’s sleep and, though faced with despair, begins each day hopefully as he grips tighter to the edges of his life.
Engaging, enlightening, and always entertaining, Planet Reese is an intensely personal and endearing tale of a man holding on to his sanity against all odds in an increasingly unhinged world.

Born and raised in Montreal, Cordelia Strube trained as an actress, moving to Toronto in the ’80s. She turned to writing plays for radio and in 1987 won the CBC Literary Competition for her play Mortal. She has also won the Toronto Arts Foundation Protege Award and been shortlisted for the Prix Italia, the Books In Canada First Novel Award, the ReLit, and the Governor General’s Award. Her seven novels include Milton’s Elements, Dr. Kalbfleisch and the Chicken Restaurant and Planet Reese.

Cordelia Strube's profile page

• Long-listed, ReLit Award

Cordelia Strube’s new novel, Planet Reese, is compelling reading. The physical setting of the novel is Toronto which Strube describes with an endearing eye. But the larger setting is the interior psychic one that transcends the physical boundaries of place and takes us to that universal, interior world of the mind. It is here that Strube’s poignant story can give us insight into the disconnect between 21st-century medicine and the people we treat.

Underappreciated Strube’s story of a guy turning into one big pain in the ass as he senses the earth going to hell finds that elusive fine line between tragic and comic. Very Smart.