“One of the most joyful moments of my life”: Canadian author’s debut novel chosen for Reese’s Book Club

When Kelly Anderson first heard that her debut novel was a Reese’s Book Club pick, she was in her physician mode at a medical clinic in Kitchener, Ont. In the course of a heavy workday with a lineup of 20 patients, she received an urgent text from her American editor to call her immediately.

Anderson’s response to that message was brief. “I can’t call you because I’m seeing patients.” Those patients had priority. It was only during a short break later that she was able to contact her editor and learn that her novel, The Wild Beneath, had become actress Reese Witherspoon’s latest choice for her popular reading club.

“I remember folding into a chair and crying,” Anderson says now. But she had to collect herself. “It was probably one of the most joyful moments of my life, but I also knew I had to keep going with my patients.” Her workday continued.

She’s adept at compartmentalizing her life. “Writing this book was a huge priority to the point that I would get up every morning at 5 o’clock to write it. And then would have my clinical day after that because I work full time in medicine.”

The Wild Below is a novel immersed in the magic and mystery of the Pacific Northwest and the waters Anderson came to know and love as a child. But it’s something of a wonder to her that this book ever happened at all. “I never planned to write fiction,” she stresses. “It was never on my agenda to write a novel.”

Then came an ordinary winter morning in 2019 when something strange happened: a book that in many ways was “fully imagined” abruptly entered her life.

She was doing a three-point turn on her driveway in Ontario. The sun was blinding and she had forgotten her sunglasses. An otherworldly image entered her mind — someone standing on the beach, and that someone would later take on the name of Walker in the book. There was a humming sound. “This character was saying something to me about metamorphosis … I was transfixed.”

She wrote and rewrote The Wild Beneath four times. There were lives she needed to explore — not just lives that intertwined with each other but also with the ocean that is a dominant presence in the remote community of Hale’s Landing. And for much of the book it’s a community on life support after a devastating tsunami that will test its survival and resilience to the limit.

A young woman named Annie faces an especially cruel testing: her parents have been swept away in the storm, her world is shattered and even the ocean water that was once a friend has become a menace. But she has a support system: there’s Annie’s childhood sweetheart, Evan, who has long learned to live with her strangeness; there’s her indomitable grandmother Ruth; and there’s Walker, the mysterious young man she rescues from the wreckage and with whom she senses an elemental, ethereal connection.

“Many humans encounter moments in their lives where everything is swept away, where they lose everything,” Anderson says. “In its place, there is grief and a loss of identity. Everything Annie knew is lost and she goes through a period of not even being able to recognize her identity … she has lost some thread of herself.