Humming with sensuality, intelligence, and a tinge of the absurd, this is the beguiling debut novel from Angélique Lalonde, the Giller-shortlisted author of Glorious Frazzled Beings. After years of shouldering the vast majority of childcare, cooking, and cleaning, the once whimsical Sarah is almost too burned out to dream. Most days, all she can muster is an imaginary version of her husband Trevor, one that actually listens to her when the weight of the kids' tantrums and the pressures of maintaining the picture-perfect image of their family online get to be too much. Meanwhile, the real Trevor is caught in a downward spiral of his own. Strangled by his creeping fear of artistic mediocrity and mounting sexual frustration, he fantasizes about the early college days when their romance was still athrill with seductive possibility, complicated as it was by his parallel obsession with Sarah's then-best friend and roommate, the enigmatic Ariadne. When both Sarah and Trevor secretly stumble on the same dreamlike, auteur pornography video based on the ancient Greek myth of Ariadne and Dionysus, they are immediately re-awakened, sucked back into a dizzying maze of secrecy, betrayals, and duplicate selves echoing backwards in time. With the arrival of a brilliant, alluring new student in Trevor's university class, the lines between fantasy and reality, memory and fiction are increasingly blurred and ruptured, threatening to collapse the walls of their mythology forever. In hypnotic prose that imbues sharp realism with all the peculiar grace of a fairytale, Variations on a Dream applies a deeply personal lens to the construction--and demolition--of a marriage. Angélique peers into the complexities of her characters and renders them with startling psychological insight, empathy, and a sly sense of humour, as they struggle to confront the myths of their relationships and themselves.