Press for Oyster

Watershed Newsletter

May 1, 2026

Belleville-born author Marianne Ackerman’s latest novel is the kind of book you can devour on a sunny May weekend in your hammock (but it’s just as good on a rainy May weekend on the porch, too!). Here’s the gist: When bestselling novelist Amelia Cameron returns to the family farm after her father’s death, old tensions resurface, sibling dynamics unravel and an unexpected literary scandal begins to take shape. It’s smart, witty and packed with messy relationships — just like all the very best books are.

Picton Gazette

May 13, 2026

Although Marianne Ackerman’s County roots go back seven generations, she considers herself a “figurative transplant,” having established her career as a playwright and novelist in Montreal.

Oyster is her third novel, and her first about the County, if you don’t count her work as the Picton correspondent for the Kingston Whig-Standard when she was a teenager. 

“I was born at Belleville General Hospital and taken home to Ameliasburgh,” she told a sold-out audience at the County Authors Festival, noting the line between born and raised tangles many County folk into knots...

Montreal Review of Books

March 11, 2026

“I don’t tell any of my family secrets. But I hope I root out everybody’s family secrets.”

It’s in the attention to the particulars, in other words, that universal themes emerge – a lesson Ackerman credits to her time in theatre.

“I think those little family problems loom very big in people’s lives. I think that’s still where we should put our attention, no matter how much the world is,” she says. “I’m becoming less political as a writer as the years go by, because I feel less and less we need to capture the moment. And who would capture this moment? What? What kind of a task would that be?” She gestures around, invoking the happenings of the past ten years – the pandemic, two Trump presidencies, political unrest at home and abroad. “I’m more interested now in eternal themes like, how do we misunderstand each other? What kind of moves do we make, despite ourselves, to pull up some kind of meaning out of our personal lives? Which I think is really what I like to write about.”