Deanna Radford

The story that unfolds is a quick and enjoyable read. Seven Days Dead features an engaging cast of characters upon a captivatingly written landscape. To ride alongside Cinq-Mars in the proverbial passenger seat as he thinks through various scenarios and learns about the lives of the townspeople makes for a satisfying and entertaining rainy day read.

The Company of Crows begins with thirteen-year-old Veronica Reid and her father driving to the Laughing Willows Trailer Park where their family will spend the summer, her father commuting from the city on weekends. It’s a spot where the family can get away, and escape is a prominent thread throughout the book.

In 1990, Paul Almond (OC) retired from his career as a television and film screen writer, director, and producer and embarked on a new career path as a novelist. His Alford Family Saga is a series of eight historical novels chronicling the arrival of his ancestors in 1880 to the Gaspé region of Quebec, and their subsequent settlement there. Each novel follows a different male protagonist along the Alford family line and offers stories about personal struggle, overcoming the odds, and love set against the backdrop of historical events.

The epigraph to Jon Paul Fiorentino’s I’m Not Scared of You or Anything is a quotation from comedian Andy Kaufman: “I never told a joke in my life.” It’s a code of conduct Kaufman undoubtedly followed. He was a prankster and a trickster – audiences sometimes wouldn’t know whether he was performing or not. His characters were strange and childlike, uncomfortable, completely open … and funny.

“It’s easy to romanticize the sea,” writes Louise Carson in Mermaid Road. While the evocative seafoam colour of this hand-bound chapbook does well to immerse the reader in a romanticized feeling of the sea, the story emphasizes the practical considerations a mermaid and her family must make when getting by in the twentieth century.

It’s October 16, 1970, the morning the War Measures Act is brought into force in Quebec. Fifteen-year-old Gaétan Simard, who has just started working in a textile factory, arrives at the apartment of his older friend Luc Maheu, also a factory worker. They’re about to go for a beer at the tavern after Gaétan’s overnight shift the first week on the job, when unexpected visitors arrive.

Some readers of Bill Haugland may remember him from his tenure (from 1961 to 2006) as a journalist and reporter at CFCF-TV in Montreal. His profession has, evidently, given him the chops to shape a story succinctly and with empathy. His first two novels, Mobile 9 and The Bidding, are devoted to crime, danger, and mystery as experienced by his main character, television reporter Ty Davis. After the Rain is Haugland’s first short story collection, and each story skilfully builds suspense.

George Ellenbogen is a cartographer of the heart and of the memories it contains. In his memoir, A Stone in My Shoe: In Search of Neighbourhood, he maps the circumstances leading to his family’s immigration to Montreal from Europe in the years prior to World War II.

Jocelyne Dubois’ first novella is about the struggles that bring us back to square one. It’s about the heartbreaks we endure, overcoming mental illness, and becoming a better version of who we are. The story of World of Glass is infused with hope for a good life and love that is gradually built over time.