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  • Published: 21 October 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529925203
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $22.99

How It Works Out





What if you could rewrite your relationship, again and again, until it worked out? The genre-bending queer love story from an unmissable debut author

What if you could rewrite your relationship, again and again, until it worked out?

‘A cause for celebration’ GEORGE SAUNDERS
‘A stunner of a debut’ NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH
'Hilarious, heart-rending, grotesque, delightful, utterly brilliant' DAISY JOHNSON
‘Exhilaratingly good’ KELLY LINK

When Myriam and Allison fall in love at a show in a run-down punk house, their relationship begins to unfold through a series of hypotheticals:

What if they became mothers by finding a baby in an alley?
What if the only cure for Myriam’s depression was Allison’s flesh?
How much darker - or sexier - would their dynamic be if one were a power-hungry CEO, and the other her lowly employee?

From the fantasies of early romance to the slow encroaching of heartbreak, each reality builds to complete a brilliant and painfully funny portrait of love’s many promises and perils.

WHAT READERS ARE SAYING:

'Wow. I will be reading everything Myriam Lacroix puts out'

'Everything Everywhere All at Once for U-haul lesbians... I'm diving in again'

'I haven't read anything like it before... Fantastic debut'

  • Published: 21 October 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529925203
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $22.99

About the author

Myriam Lacroix

Myriam Lacroix was born in Montreal to a Québécois mother and a Moroccan father. She has a BFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and an MFA from Syracuse University, where she was editor in chief of Salt Hill and received the New York Public Humanities Fellowship for creating Out-Front, an LGBTQ+ writing group whose goal was to expand the possibilities of queer writing. She currently lives in Vancouver.

Praise for How It Works Out

What an audacious, breathtaking and inspiring debut. The power of this formally innovative and deeply funny book is that everything exists to serve the compassionate heart at its core. Myriam Lacroix's work is a cause for celebration

George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo

How It Works Out is a delightfully bizarre and unabashedly queer revelation; a truly captivating exploration of love. Myriam Lacroix's kaleidoscopic first novel invites you to embrace the unconventional and revel in the multiverse of 'what-ifs' we only wish we could explore in our own relationships. We loved it

Tegan and Sara Quin, authors of High School

I loved this book. It’s like nothing else I’ve read. Every single page kept me guessing – it's rare to read something so delightfully strange

Kirsty Logan, author of Now She is Witch

Hilarious, heart-rending, grotesque, delightful, utterly brilliant

Daisy Johnson, author of Everything Under

In How It Works Out, we see wonderfully different iterations of Myriam and Allison that all work together in the most satisfying and unexpected ways. Lacroix writes with a brave heart, a fiercely inventive mind, and a breathtaking ability to render it all in precise, stellar sentences. A hilarious, unsettling, and moving debut

Dana Spiotta, author of Eat the Document

The shape-shifting, speculative history of a Great Love, in which any distinction between what really happened, what might have happened, and what couldn’t possibly have happened is thrillingly moot. Funny and lusty and wistful and bold; best of all, it genuinely feels unlike anything you’ve read before

Jonathan Dee, author of The Privileges

How It Works Out is madcap, delirious, exhilaratingly good

Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love

Myriam Lacroix knows exactly how macabre love can be. With a biting (literally) wit Lacroix devises a startling multiverse where finding the love of your life is just the beginning of a surrealistic quest

Jewelle Gomez, author of The Gilda Stories

Lacroix has written a beautifully brilliant, hilariously sad, stunner of a debut that never forgets about the heart

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Chain-Gang All-Stars

A mesmerizing novel-in-stories... No matter the scenario, Lacroix shows a gift for cutting to the heart of things: the way you inevitably open yourself up to both injury and transformation when you try to love and be loved... As kaleidoscopic as the queer experience, this is an introduction to a writer of great imagination

Kirkus, *Starred Review*

The book’s prose is brilliant. It’s sophisticated and smart, and at the same time, it melts on the tongue like candy and is quick to digest... A gorgeous, speculative exercise in romance that’s as bound together as it is fragmented. I predict Lacroix’s style of writing will inspire imitations of this surreal, broken, sewn together tapestry of a story, told deliberately and nonsensically. I was half sad this was a debut because I wanted there to be more

Autostraddle

Cinematic... sharply evoked

Daily Mail

One of the quirkiest, and most rewarding, novels in recent memory

Toronto Star
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