Catherine Bush

Catherine Bush is a Canadian novelist whose fiction examines responsibility, risk, displacement, and the uneasy boundary between private decisions and public events. The Rules of Engagement, her second novel, follows Arcadia Hearne, a Canadian expatriate working at a London center devoted to contemporary war studies. Publishers Weekly describes the book’s interwoven concerns with intervention, trust, and personal history, while Penguin Random House records its national-bestseller status and City of Toronto Book Award shortlist. Arcadia’s encounter with a Somali singer and an Iranian translator forces her to reconsider both her professional theories and a damaging episode from her university years. Bush uses London and Toronto settings to connect international conflict with intimate forms of avoidance and obligation. The Rules of Engagement offers literary fiction that treats ideas as active pressures on character. The novel asks when observation becomes complicity, how much risk genuine engagement requires, and whether a carefully defended life can remain separate from other people’s emergencies.