Aspiring novelist Molly MacGregor's life is strikingly different from a literary heroine's. Named for one of literature's least romantic protagonists, Moll Flanders, Molly lives in Edmonton, a city she finds irredeemably unromantic, where she writes university term papers instead of novels, and sells shoes in the Largest Mall on Earth.

There she seeks the other half of her young life's own matched pair. Delightfully whimsical, Heidi L.M. Jacobs' Molly of the Mall: Literary Lass and Purveyor of Fine Footwear explores its namesake's love for the written word, love for the wrong men (and the right one), and her complicated love for her city. (From NeWest Press)

Heidi L.M. Jacobs was born and raised in Edmonton. She is currently the English and History Librarian at the Ontario-based University of Windsor. Molly of the Mall won the 2020 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour.

"When I was a student, I was taking a summer writing course and we had to come up with five or six pages every day for five days for six weeks. It was intense. I was living in the U.S. at the time, writing this thing about this character who worked at a shoe store in a shopping mall. People really liked it.

"I kept working on it, off and on, for quite a number of years. I lived in the U.S. for about eight years. I found the farther I was away from Edmonton, the more I started thinking about Edmonton as a place and what being Canadian meant."