Available Summer 2026!
Maybe It’s Me
For most of his adult life, Adrian Michael Kelly succeeded in spite of himself, if he succeeded at all. Failure was his speciality–serial, sometimes comic but also epic failure. Born to a gambling-addicted, compulsively spending mother who left when he was five, and raised by his dad, a haunted and often violent, harddrinking Scot, Kelly learned failure early, and learned it remarkably well: how to be small, how to be safe, how to be self-defeating. By the age of thirty, he was larking around abroad, trying (and failing) to write like his literary heroes while mired in bad relationships and dead-end work.
On a grey October morning in 1999, thunderously hungover and sick to death of himself, he boarded a train in Zurich bound for Bergamo and entered the initial, terrifying stages of a months-long and near-total breakdown, less a psychological than spiritual emergency–full-bore and loud.
Maybe It’s Me recounts what led up to that emergency as well as its aftermath, when Kelly came back to Canada in the hopes of moving on with his life. For a while, he did just that: published his first novel, earned a PhD, and met his future wife. In no way, however, was failure done with him. At the very summit of his hardwon achievements, life and his own folly brought him low again–dangerously low. Chronically unemployed, crippled by hideous back pain, and driven to despair by the mother of all writer’s block, he was divorced and nearly homeless at the age of forty-seven. But along with how to fail, Kelly knew how not to quit, and set about the process–long and difficult–of building a consequential, good-enough life. It involved unusual cheese, a shaman and maverick shrinks, a rainbow feather duster, and charitable mermaids.
Free of self-pity and always beautifully told, Maybe It’s Me is for everyone who gets in their own way, everyone who trips and falls down the stairs of themselves–and can still have a laugh about it.
About the Author
Adrian Michael Kelly lives in Kingston, Ontario. He is the author of Down Sterling Road, a novel, the collection of short stories, The Ambassador of What, and the forthcoming memoir, Maybe It’s Me (Summer, 2026). His essays and journalism have appeared in The Globe & Mail, the Calgary Herald, CNQ: Canadian Notes and Queries, and other periodicals. He holds a PhD in English (with a Creative Writing focus) and has taught writing and literature to students and professionals worldwide.
Other Books by the Author
The Ambassador of What
A collection of linked stories about fathers, sons, and the complicated reality that is family.
Slogging through the miles of a city marathon, an eleven-year- old boy encounters small miracles; about to marry one of her patients in a home for the elderly, a nurse asks her estranged son to come to the wedding, and give her away; home from university, a young man has Christmas dinner with his hard-up dad in a bistro behind a rural gas bar. Men and boys and maleness, money and its lack, the long haunt of childhood, marriage and divorce—these lie at the heart of The Ambassador of What. Driven by an ear for how we talk, how we feel, how we fail, and how we love, these are tough and tender stories that take hold, and linger.
Down Sterling Road
Eleven-year-old Jacob McKnight doesn’t like running. He doesn’t like the hills, the cold wind, the slushy electrolyte drinks, the interval training. He doesn’t like the way his dad is always pushing him: harder, faster, what’s wrong with you, boy? But mostly he doesn’t like the way it gives him time to think about the accident that shattered his brother’s body and his parents’ marriage.
Jacob would rather be drawing than running. He likes the Anatomy Colouring Book his dad gave him, and he likes how it helps him to better draw superheroes, with their unbreakable bodies. He likes, too, how drawing makes him forget about how much he misses his mum, about how hard his dad works to pay for their tiny apartment and secondhand clothes, about the pitying whispers that follow them around Glanisberg.
Down Sterling Road parses the anatomy of childhood with wisdom, wit and wonder; it’s one of the most charismatic books you’ll read all year.
