When Julia arrives in Medway in the 1990s, accompanying her beloved Hardy on his first posting as an RCMP officer, she tries to explain their new life to old friends from the city, but can find no shared vocabulary to convey this rural reality, let alone police life. As Hardy disappears into long days and nights at work, Julia takes a job as editor of the local newspaper, the Observer. Interviewing people to compose a view of the town each week, she gathers knowledge of the community's surface joys and sorrows; meanwhile, Hardy works the harder side, immersed in violence and loss, and Julia can only witness his increasing exhaustion and despair. At first this new life together is an adventure, but as in all the best stories, time will both darken and deepen it. Grounded in the author's experience as an RCMP member's spouse starting in Mayerthorpe, Alberta, The Observer is a gripping, spare, emotionally complex story from one of Canada's most beloved storytellers.