“My search is not about acquiring properties, but about transforming them. And I confess that what I really enjoy—even before redesigning the spaces—is reading the listings.”

The ivy-covered façade of a French chateau. The open-concept kitchen of a Canadian detached home. Then, half a world away: a Japanese residence in a peaceful mountain village with a small mountain behind it, where occasionally you can hear warblers crying.

While others birdwatch or knit, Ian Williams—Giller-winning novelist, poet, and essayist—has turned browsing real estate listings into a pastime par excellence. In this essay, he guides the reader through a poetic series of listings from around the world. Highlighting cultural differences and savouring beautiful turns of phrase, Williams shows the reader how good listings offer us more than a potential home—they offer versions of ourselves.

This chapbook is a hand-made, limited-edition publication. Only 200 have been printed.

Praise for Ian Williams

“Williams’s imaginative, intricate tapestries are dazzling … In his rich probes of language and intimacy, legacy and inheritance, he slyly shows that reproduction is consequential, but so is everything else.”
—The New York Times Book Review

"There’s a fluidity and zest to Williams’s insightful writing, underpinned by numerous experiments with form and style."
—The Guardian

"[His work is] driven as much by its relationships as its characters, and is intensified and enriched by an inventive style that borrows from Williams’s giant poet’s brain."
—The Globe and Mail

"Disorientation is so honest, vulnerable, courageous and funny that it left me dying to sit down over a long coffee with Ian Williams. Make that two lattes, and I'm buying!"
—Lawrence Hill, author of The Book of Negroes

About the Author

Ian Williams is the author of eight acclaimed books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction and has won major awards for his work in every genre. His debut novel, Reproduction, won the 2019 Giller Prize; his poetry collection, Personals, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize; and his short story collection, Not Anyone’s Anything, won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best first collection of short fiction in Canada. In 2024, he delivered the Massey Lectures, What I Mean to Say: Remaking Conversation in Our Time. Williams is renowned for his highly original, often off-beat style. His most recent novel, You’ve Changed, longlisted for the 2025 Giller Prize, is sharp, inventive and absurdly funny—a wild ride of a novel that explores identity, insecurity, intimacy and desire, and how individuals, when they unite, change despite promising not to.