In Susan Wadds’s What the Living Do, Brett Catlin spends her working days on the roads, dealing with the remains of animals struck by vehicles. The task places mortality in her daily routine. Yet the death that occupies her deepest thoughts is much older: the loss of her father and young sister in childhood, which she has long interpreted through the lens of personal guilt.

The novel’s public description follows Brett at thirty-seven, living with her younger partner Cole and facing a cancer diagnosis that brings unresolved questions to the foreground. These facts establish a literary work more interested in how people inhabit pain than in solving a single external mystery. Brett’s challenge is not discovering that the past occurred; it is finding another way to live with what she believes it means.

When guilt becomes an identity

Wadds has discussed her protagonist’s conviction that she caused the earlier deaths, and that assumption matters. Guilt can begin as a feeling about an event, then become a story through which every later experience is interpreted. Brett treats herself as someone who deserves too little, while the people close to her may see a more complex human being. The novel’s setup promises tension between those views.

Calling such guilt irrational from the outside would skip its emotional power. A child may remember an ordinary action and retrospectively connect it to a catastrophe that no child could have fully understood or controlled. The point of a serious literary treatment is not necessarily to produce a tidy declaration of innocence. It can be to examine the costly ways an old private verdict organizes a grown person’s decisions.

The road crew and its quiet rituals

Brett’s unusual work is a distinctive part of the book’s premise. The account published by Foreword Reviews mentions her coworker Mel, an Ojibwe man whose prayers for the dead animals bring another understanding of how living people might respond to loss. The contrast is suggestive: what Brett has learned to handle as physical cleanup may also call for acknowledgement, attention and care.

Readers should resist reducing Mel or his spiritual practice to a simple device for a white protagonist’s growth. His presence, as described by reviewers, introduces a different relationship to animal death; the novel’s actual treatment of that relationship deserves to be judged with cultural specificity. Even on the evidence available, the setting raises a fruitful question: what does it mean to tend what others prefer not to see?

Intimacy under the weight of silence

Cole is an important figure in Brett’s present life. The author’s own account describes a relationship strained not by an absence of affection but by Brett’s efforts to keep her guilt hidden. Withholding pain can look like independence to the person doing it, while feeling like distance to a partner who wants to help. This familiar dynamic gains sharper edges when the underlying experience is one of traumatic loss.

The synopsis also notes Brett’s fear about her value and her future. In that context, choices about intimacy and family are unlikely to be simple matters of preference. The novel’s premise invites attention to the difference between needing space and believing one has no right to be cared for. That distinction may interest readers of psychologically observant fiction, especially where love is not offered as a magical cure.

Illness changes the horizon

A cancer diagnosis confronts Brett with a form of uncertainty that cannot remain locked in childhood memory. The plot summary connects illness with her sense of punishment and with decisions about medical care. That makes bodily autonomy and self-worth central to the announced storyline. It also requires care from readers: the medical choices of a fictional character should not be taken as advice about treatment.

Illness narratives often turn on the difference between what can be controlled and what cannot. Here, those questions intersect with an older habit of assigning blame. If someone already assumes she deserves suffering, treatment decisions and requests for support may carry a burden beyond their immediate practical consequences. The public description gives enough material to consider this connection without claiming knowledge of every choice or scene.

Animals, attention and the question of saving

The Canadian Authors Association summary asks who is worth saving. That question ties Brett’s work, her love for animals, and her fear for her own future into one memorable concern. It can be asked literally of a sick creature or symbolically of a person who has excluded herself from the circle of those deserving help. The novel does not need a grand speech to make the question unsettling.

Animal encounters can be sentimental in fiction, but Wadds’s published premise is earthier than that. Roadkill is neither an abstract emblem nor a comfortable scene. The physical reality of Brett’s duties may keep the book’s examination of grief from becoming detached from the world. Its animal imagery appears to connect questions of vulnerability with ordinary forms of work that most people seldom notice.

The literary approach

What the Living Do is a novel from Regal House Publishing, released in 2024. Review and author descriptions identify it as literary fiction shaped by grief, sexuality, physical illness and the burden of memory. Readers may expect an interior narrative in which the texture of Brett’s experience matters at least as much as outward events. The book’s full style cannot be certified from a short synopsis, however.

The important selling point is the specificity of its setup. A road worker who writes poetry and carries an ancient guilt offers a different vantage on mourning from an interchangeable damaged protagonist. The people around Brett and the materials of her working life complicate the question of whether healing means fixing oneself or learning to remain connected. That is a valid editorial reading of the premise, not an assertion about the ending.

Who may want to read this novel?

Readers seeking contemporary literary fiction about survivor’s guilt, complicated relationships and the body’s vulnerability may find the book worth investigating. Its published material suggests a serious treatment of how trauma persists inside ordinary routines. It may especially interest those who appreciate novels that place emotionally charged themes in tactile workplaces rather than in abstract therapeutic conversations.

There are also reasons to approach it thoughtfully. The story involves bereavement, childhood tragedy, illness and difficult questions about treatment, and those subjects may be demanding for some readers. This feature offers no invented reassurance about how lightly or heavily the author handles them. For a reader ready for that emotional terrain, What the Living Do supplies an unusually clear and challenging premise.

A note on the author

Susan E. Wadds is a Canadian writer whose work has appeared in literary journals. Regal House Publishing identifies What the Living Do as her debut novel and provides background on her work as a writing workshop facilitator. Her own published reflections discuss the character of Brett and the distance trauma can create in intimate relationships, making them useful companions to the novel’s description.