When Haley Mlotek was ten years old, she told her mother to leave her father. Divorce was all around her. Her mother ran a mediation and marriage counseling practice out of Mlotek's childhood home, and Mlotek spent her preteen years answering the phones and typing out parenting plans for couples in the process of leaving each other. She grew up with the sense that divorce was an outcome to both resist and desire, an ordeal that promised something better on the other side of something bad. But when she herself went on to marry — and then divorce — the man she had been with for twelve years, suddenly, she had to reconsider everything she thought she understood about divorce.

Deftly combining her personal story with wry, searching social and literary exploration, No Fault is a brilliant account of 21st century divorce — its remarkably common yet seemingly singular impact, and what it reveals about our society and our desires for family, love, and friendship. Mlotek asks profound questions about what divorce should be, who it is for, and why the institution of marriage maintains its power, all while charting a poignant and cathartic journey away from her own marriage and towards an unknown future.

Brilliant, funny, and unflinchingly honest, No Fault is a kaleidoscopic look at marriage, secrets, ambitions, and what it truly means to love and live with uncertainty, betrayal, and hope.

(From McClelland & Stewart)

No Fault is available in February 2025.

Haley Mlotek is a Montreal-based writer and editor whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker and ELLE, among others. A founding member of the Freelance Solidarity Project, Mlotek also teaches in the english and journalism departments at Concordia University. She previously worked as deputy editor at SSENSE, style editor at MTV News, editor at The Hairpin and publisher of WORN Fashion Journal.