Lucas Harari’s debut graphic novel, Swimming in Darkness, has all the markers of a debut by a talented, creative, smart young dude. It’s full of promise as the first movement in a career with potential. If you like work in a noir-influenced genre that takes place in a mysterious location filled with freaky locals and conspiracies, then this is for you.
This latest book from the prolific and thoughtful novelist and non-fiction writer Mary Soderstrom considers instances of imperfect cleavage. So-called frenemy nations, she writes, are separate states with “so much in common they might seem like unidentical twins.”
The true heroes of history don’t always announce themselves. Sometimes they have to be found. Consider Lauro de Bosis. You might not know him now, but by the time you've finished Taras Grescoe's new book he may well be in your personal pantheon.
In her lively debut collection of short comics, Ebony Flowers illustrates the lives of Black women and girls, using hair as a way to explore self-image, intimacy, family bonds, friendship, racism, and colonization.
Éric Mathieu’s The Little Fox of Mayerville is a coming-of-age tale that follows the life of Émile Claudel, a young outcast born into a small village in France in 1945. Although he exhibits many of the traits of a burgeoning genius, Émile is brought up in a traditional home where children are meant to be seen and not heard. Told through a series of vignettes of varying lengths comprised of both prose and poetic verse, the novel offers an intimate glimpse into the mind of a young boy who yearns to belong.
In Martin Lukacs’s The Trudeau Formula: Seduction and Betrayal in an Age of Discontent, the political and rhetorical interchangeability between the country’s two largest parties is shown to have never been as apparent as with the rise of the Trudeau brand over the past fifty years.
Living through dread is usually an extremely uncomfortable experience, whether in life or art. Sometimes in art, discomfort is the point, horror movies being an easy example. In The Country Will Bring Us No Peace, translated by Pablo Strauss, Matthieu Simard tacks the ship of dread in a different direction. For the most part, it is a pleasurable book, the dread passing by like a quiet late summer day in the countryside, with neat sentences paced nicely with more indulgently pretty or philosophical ones.
The Courage of Elfina is the captivating story of a teen who finds herself in a very adult situation. Elfina lives in the country on the banks of the Paraguay River. Her mother died in child birth, while her father is often away working on a large farm in neighbouring Brazil.
In Laurence Leduc-Primeau’s first novel, In the End They Told Them All to Get Lost, we follow Chloé, a young Quebecker who has just moved to an unnamed South American country, running away from something that is never fully defined.
On a warm, spring Easter Day afternoon, I visited the offices of Black Rose Books to speak with the members of the collective – Dimitrios Roussopoulos, Nathan McDonnell, Clara-Swan Kennedy, and Dan G. Reid – about the past, present, and future of this Montreal literary institution.
