YOU'VE CHANGED

The eagerly awaited follow-up novel from the Giller prize-winning author of Reproduction, You've Changed is a daring and clever dissection of a crumbling marriage between two people who are morphing in ways that confound each other.

Middle-aged and about to be dumped from his construction job, Beckett is not feeling his best especially since his wife, Princess, is already pressuring him to improve himself. She's a fitness instructor who spends a lot of time and energy finetuning every inch of her body. Still, they both think their marriage is basically fine, until a couple of friends show up for a visit, their mutual affection and sexual chemistry loudly on display. In one weekend, they upset the tenuous balance between Beckett and Princess, throwing them into parallel midlife crises.

Princess thinks the problem is physical, and attempts to revive Beckett's interest with relentless surgical alterations and bodily enhancements that have the opposite effect on her husband. Beckett tries to woo Princess back to him by relaunching his contracting business, laying his manly accomplishments at her feet. Then, while Princess is away pursuing even more drastic beauty measures, Beckett meets Gluten, an energetic and erratic man devoted to living in the moment, whom Beckett feels drawn to in ways that surprise him. Beckett is changing, Princess is changing: what will happen to their already stressed marriage?

Sharp, inventive and absurdly funny, You've Changed is a wild ride exploring identity, insecurity, intimacy and desire, and who individuals become when they unite, and how they change despite promising not to.

Ian Williams is the author of the novel Reproduction, which was the winner of the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize and was published in the U.S., U.K., and Italy; Personals, which was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award; Not Anyone's Anything, winner of the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best first collection of short fiction in Canada, and You Know Who You Are, a finalist for the ReLit Prize for poetry. In 2020 he published his latest poetry collection, Word Problems. In fall 2021 he released Disorientation: Being Black in the World, which was shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers Trust Prize for Non-Fiction and the BC Book Prize for Non-Fiction. He has been named the 2024 CBC Massey Lecturer.