The Collingwood author is renowned for her bubbly personality, which is why the subject matter of her novels is such a surprise.
by Dianne Rinehart
When Maggie Giles was choosing an excerpt from her award-winning first book, The Things We Lost, to read at her book launch, she thought nothing of reading a sex scene between the protagonist, Maddie, and the character’s best friend’s partner. Yikes!
So, she was taken aback when a girlfriend of hers, who is a writer of romance books—a genre renowned for being spicy in that department—told her she was surprised Maggie had chosen something so risqué.
“That’s risqué?” she asked her friend incredulously. In fact, Maggie’s dad, who was at the book launch, was visibly uncomfortable, her friend told her.
Even more interesting is her boyfriend’s reaction to it all. He doesn’t read her books, she says. “He doesn’t necessarily want to know what is going on up here,” she laughs as she points to her head.
Giles’ books are meant to look at the uncomfortable aspects of humanity. Whether it’s a gritty sexual betrayal or a look inside the mind of a serial killer, Giles does not flinch from exploring our quirks, our failures, and the actions and passions that shame us.
Which is what makes her books so good—along with murders and mayhem and time travel along the way—and her female heroines so raw and so real.
It also is making her a hot literary ticket with her Canadian publisher, Rising Action Publishing (Maggie was literally the first writer they had ever signed), and her American publisher Simon & Schuster.
Her first book came out in December 2020, and she has been on a tear ever since. Her second book, Twisted, came out in April 2022, and the sequel, Wicked, will be out this April, followed by her fourth book,
The Art of Murder, which comes out in June.
Head spinning? Maggie takes it in stride. She says she’s got lots more ideas in her, and lots of characters and settings—yes, Collingwood inspires her—to base her books on.
Her mind is always ticking, she says. “What if this happened?” is the starting point to a book that will keep you riveted until the very last page—and haunted with what-ifs thereafter.
