From the award-winning author of Good to a Fault and The Little Shadows, the novel Marina Endicott has waited to write for twenty years, based on her life-changing experience as the spouse of an RCMP officer. A famous quote from Tolstoy says there are only two stories in this world: "A person goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town." Acclaimed writer Marina Endicott has been alternating between those poles in her books to date, but as she says about this novel: "Now it turns out I'm the stranger who comes to town." The title The Observer refers to protagonist Julia, who is based on a younger Marina; it is also the name of the local newspaper where Julia works. And the story is inspired by the author's experience of accompanying her partner to his first posting with the RCMP in Mayerthorpe (called Medway here), a town in Alberta that rose to public notoriety in 2005 when a man there killed four RCMP members and himself. When Julia arrives in Medway in 2000, she tries to explain to her urban, artist friends about her life with Hardy, the man she passionately loves. But she finds she shares no vocabulary with those in her past to convey her new rural reality, let alone police life. Determined to keep busy and help carry the household while Hardy spends long, exhausting days at work, Julia takes a job with the local newspaper, interviewing people and composing a view of the town each week. Slowly and carefully, she gathers knowledge of its inhabitants and rhythms, its joys and sorrows, as her life as the partner of a police officer begins -- and soon town and relationship both fall into a pattern of small, everyday happinesses alongside darker existential fears. In this gripping, spare, emotionally complex story, Endicott writes with the understated acuity, taut pacing, and sureness of a master novelist, piecing together shattered memories and haunting details in a devastating revelation about the fragility of life, death, and law in a tightknit and vulnerable community.