Excerpts fantasy Read an Excerpt From The Lost Spectacular by Zoé Duhaime Noon Bonaventure and Munro Forrest weren’t always rivals chasing each other through the pages of books… By Zoé Duhaime | Published on August 26, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Lost Spectacular by Zoé Duhaime, a new fantasy novel out from Erewhon Books on September 29th. Noon Bonaventure and Munro Forrest weren’t always rivals chasing each other through the pages of books. They grew up listening to stories from Munro’s grandmother and arguing over their favorites. But then one night, they discovered the Spectacular, a mysterious, ever-changing festival glittering with everything lost: lone pearl earrings and apple orchards, abandoned first drafts and shipwrecks, a skyful of umbrellas. This Spectacular, found only by invitation or in the pages of misprints, is the most precious thing in the world. In its wake, stories settle. Noon has always been the sort to move on with grace, and Munro goes into the business of never letting go—their divide starker than ever after a misstep abruptly closes the door on what could have been.Now long estranged yet forever drawn to one another, Noon and Munro’s differences have defined their ways of life. Munro, an ambitious museum curator, vows his next exhibit will trap the Spectacular and return its lost treasures, while Noon, queen of cat-and-mouse, has been chosen as the next captain of the show.As opening night for Munro’s exhibit draws closer, he and Noon will have to stop running and finally agree on how their story ends—and perhaps, find a way to start again. Buy the Book The Lost Spectacular Zoé Duhaime Buy Book The Lost Spectacular Zoé Duhaime Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Chapter One This Too Shall Pass In the third chapter entitled “The Wild Wood” in the book The Wind in the Willows (1908) by Kenneth Grahame, the character Mole had an umbrella stand with no umbrella. This is because it was stolen. It had been quite some time since Noon Bonaventure had last seen a book move. Words just didn’t dance for her like they used to, the secret in the margins had gone on holiday. She had even forgotten about the man in the charcoal cloak—or something like forgetting—and had been showing customers to their books without care. Even to the shelves of rare landscape fiction, she hadn’t been too concerned. The worst that could happen, after all, was that a client would think they needed glasses, or had stayed up too late, or maybe that they should go to church. There had been no one in years looking on purpose at La Tobaganne, no one since her dad had passed and the households drifted. It was a peculiar rainy day in the City Not-Unlike-Montréal when Odette came looking for her usual order of misprints. Odette visiting wasn’t itself odd—she was a spirited retiree who liked to backseat drive the failing English-language bookshop—but already that day things had gone quite wrong. The only other shop hand had given in her two weeks’ notice, a home visit for a private collection had ended with a marriage proposal from a septuagenarian, and the barista next door had visited to warn that their basement had entirely flooded. The misprint of The Wind in the Willows hadn’t raised any alarm bells, it was only a typo in the table of contents. The illustrations were all where they were supposed to be when Noon pulled it off its shelf for one of her only reliable clients. Then, clear as day, the foreword stirred. Like sand in a sieve, a sentence percolated and reordered itself. The man in the charcoal cloak fumed. “Where the hell have you been? The draft is done and Wordsworth is over.” Noon closed the book as casually as she could manage it and started to pull its neighbours: the letters of Jules Verne, A. A. Milne, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and other stars of her childhood. Odette, who wasn’t an easy customer at the best of times, watched coolly. Years ago she’d explained she was a retired archivist, and occasionally her temperament betrayed a fierce need for order, usually at the bargaining table or whenever a client of the café brought a coffee to the bookshelves. “You know, I’d forgotten, but the Grahame is actually on hold,” Noon tried. “That’s bad business, angel. I’d have given five for it yesterday.” Five hundred for a typo in the table of contents was outrageous even for Odette. The young shopkeeper drummed her fingers on the cover and weighed a basement flood against the worst-case scenario for a fellow in a charcoal cloak. “But I’d give seven today, I’ve got an appointment.” “You might be interested in this—here, it’s got “The Sandman” (1816) by Hoffmann, and it’s Desplechin’s signed copy.” That was, she knew, Odette’s weakness—operatic set designers, lush illustrators. “He’s intolerably dramatic—absolutely not.” “Andersen’s diaries (1871)? It’s got a dedication—” As if on cue, it started to thunder. Surely the basement waterline was rising. “Seven is a fair price for Grahame and you know it,” Odette continued. The radio was doing nothing to cut the quickly growing tension between the two women. There had only been two customers that morning, and just yesterday there had been a hydro bill. Noon clapped the cover of the book together a few times, hoping maybe she could at least scare off any interlopers. Seven would give her a moment to breathe. She hoped they weren’t by the riverbank, in the first chapter—that was her favourite part. But you couldn’t trust storybook characters who’d crawled out of their books to throw a circus, not as far as you could throw them. At this point in her life, however, money meant more than the secrets of others: Money meant a break in the rain for the bookshop. “Seven is more than fair,” she agreed. Every receipt she hand-wrote in her dead father’s fountain pen (always). We all know where this is going. The apartment upstairs was only zoned for living by a prayer, but things were easier in the City Not-Unlike-Montréal. Inspectors were rare, and Noon Bonaventure was charming. The visits so far had ended with many comments about how difficult it was to run a business these days, much less as a young woman, and how well did books even sell, anyways. Inspectors were not the problem. The corner of Rue Bader Ginsberg and Blvd Rigaud was not the bookseller’s paradise that it had been, back before Noon’s life had gone to hell. On the bright side, there were now two dentists she could turn to in a pinch, and her smile had never been brighter. She was the last bastion of a dying neighbourhood trade. Her tastes were eclectic, but she was the child of a bookshop owner and an apprentice of surrender. Those days she was on a steady march of gardening memoirs, transport history, letter collections, and cookery. Fiction felt those days like an empty hall of mirrors. If the basement next door hadn’t been flooding, Noon would have spent the night with her binding tools and a glass of wine, and might have entertained a date. Hell, she might have even sensed something was wrong. But as it was, she was up to her knees in swamp water and helping to haul up buckets. The café owner was beside himself. “Ah fuck, there goes the eight ounces— Are you sure your dad didn’t tell you where he kept the pump?” Long stacks of paper cups were sailing around the gurgling floor drain, now a whirlpool. The radio from upstairs was reporting on citywide flooding. Even the mayor and her pretty bicycle were lamenting. “You know, I forgot to ask,” Noon shouted, a bucket in each hand. “Can you call your mom?!” Noon nodded and dragged the buckets up the stairs, past frantic baristas. If she’d been more approachable that year, they might all be friends. A napkin plumed by her, the door blew open, all things passed her by. She dialed her mom. “Allô maman, how’s the dinner crowd?” A rainstorm in that city always meant more bottles of wine. Hardly anyone could keep track of their umbrellas, and everyone in a City Not-Unlike-Montréal looked better with wet hair anyways. Her mom said as much from her popular restaurant that she ran like a newsroom. “Did Dad ever tell you where he kept the storm supplies? The pump? No, I don’t know, he just said the pump. Oh, god—” The door to the café burst open. A siren somewhere was joined by another. Noon’s hair was a river down her neck, and a cyclist spun across the intersection. There were a million things she had forgotten to ask when her dad got sick, and they ranged from inconvenient to devastating. Most she had made peace with, and then every so often there was a rainstorm. Apparently her dad had lent it out to a friend. Then, of course, he’d gotten sick and died, and in the interim, they’d had bigger fish to fry at La Tobaganne, never mind in la famille Bonaventure. She was personally proud that she had made it out of brain cancer without a one-way ticket anywhere else. Of course, her dad had many friends, and those friends had many businesses, and she would bet that all of them had flooded basements at that very moment. There was a boom of thunder and a split of lightning. The rain was thick as pencils. “I’ll add it to the list then, thanks, Mom! Courage!” She took a deep breath and turned around. Her neighbour had made one of his employees cry. “You know what, Joseph? I have no clue where the pump is, my mom doesn’t know, and I’ve got to get back.” There was silence and a crash. “Can you call the Lafitte boy?!” The Lafitte boy was one degree of proximity too close to a bad time, but years ago, he’d been good with downspouts and drains and all that. Noon didn’t call for help, and she certainly didn’t call in that direction. Instead of answering, she stepped out into the storm. Across the street, blurred by water, interrupted by bicycles leaving a wake behind them and children in ladybug jackets, was a man in a charcoal cloak. A mail carrier in yellow galoshes stomped past her. She was a character in a story—she knew it, and she hated it. On her desk was a stack of correspondence and bills in a puddle, plus an omen of doom. The notice had the City Not-Unlike-Montréal motif on the corner. All business owners flinched upon receiving one. Notices of road construction had closed the bookshop down the road, her favourite Cajun restaurant, and a florist. It seemed like Blvd Rigaud was under construction so often that Noon wondered if they’d gotten anything right the first time they built it. Only the dentists and lawyers survived. Noon took a deep breath and did what had gotten her through the decade. “This too shall pass,” she murmured, and shrugged off her jacket. Construction would eventually bring wider sidewalks and better foot traffic. Perhaps she could have a terrace, serve wine, and have also have her bookshop. La Tobaganne needed a paint job too. Maybe she could take advantage of the slower traffic, and the loud noise, and the death knell of flimsier businesses. She’d give her contact at The Gazelle a call and see if they couldn’t do another joint event. Most importantly though, nothing was worse than brain cancer, and besides, she needed to get through the flood—first things first. The mobiles her dad had hung up, wooden whales and toboggans and somersaults of flowers spun on their threads. A toy train slowly rolled around a table of locomotive memoirs, each carriage a candleholder. The glass lamps glowed like honey jars in the dark, and the toboggan nailed above the door cast shadows that looked like dentures. A portrait of her dad and Vermillion Forrest was framed behind the front desk. Just out of frame, though she felt their presence constantly, was her as a girl and her best friend, the bad time mentioned above, the king of sour nostalgia and good shoes, museum curator of never letting go, Munro Singh Forrest. Beside that photo was a painting of Millie as a girl, something Noon had inherited after the woman’s death, artist unknown. There were many, many feature pieces from The Gazelle, also framed. Along the floor was a thin spiral of sand, leading from the desk to the door. Noon looked up again, to be sure of what she had seen on her way over—beyond the blur, through the rain, the man in the charcoal cloak. More than anything, he annoyed Noon, a nuisance from a folktale she tried not to entertain. She didn’t wave, and wondered gloweringly what they wanted this time. It was a quiet life, but she was making it work. That was true until she saw beneath the notice of construction a grey envelope. June Clara Bonaventure, La Tobaganne, proprietor 852 Rue Bader GinsbergA City Not-Unlike-Montréal***The Spectacular!9 o’clock this evening, in the garden behind the library.Come as you are. It had been years since she’d last seen the red seal on the back, pressed on a long white feather and dusted with a gold lustre. There were marvellous things just down the street, and luxuries she didn’t look at. The invitation might have been recycled there and then, like the rest of them, if she hadn’t first noticed that her fountain pen was missing, and then lost her damn mind. Excerpted from The Lost Spectacular, copyright © 2026 by Zoé Duhaime. The post Read an Excerpt From <i>The Lost Spectacular</i> by Zoé Duhaime appeared first on Reactor.