In But When We Look Closer, her debut collection of eighteen short stories, Susan E. Lloy establishes a literary version of film noir, presenting us with characters whose suffering comes in many forms. In prose that fluctuates between stark and densely cinematic, Lloy explores the inner lives of the lost, the lonely, and the mentally ill.
With The House on Selkirk Avenue, Karafilly offers a richly seductive account of a love affair with and in Montreal, balanced by a realistic portrayal of a woman confronting middle age, obsessed with the passing of time. Readers who allow themselves to fall under its sway will be rewarded.
Hostage is the account, as told to Delisle, of how a Doctors Without Borders worker in Nazran, Russia, was kidnapped by Chechen rebels in 1997 and held for three months in an undisclosed location. And there, handcuffed to a radiator in a bare room with a boarded-up window, trying to maintain hope, is where we find Christophe André for most of this remarkable book’s 400-plus pages.
With the continuing popularity of Scandinavian noir, it was only a matter of time before someone tried their hand at outright Arctic noir. With her second novel Polynya, Montreal author Mélanie Vincelette gamely steps up to the plate with a murder mystery – of sorts – set in Nunavut.
Cartoonist Vanessa Davis made a big name for herself in 2010 with Make Me A Woman, a relatable, endearing, and funny book. Spaniel Rage, which was Davis’s first attempt at comics, contains hints of her work to come.
The Montreal Review of Books invited Marc Raboy, author of Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World, to answer a few questions about Guglielmo Marconi’s enduring significance and the experience of writing his biography.
Dominique Fortier's novel, The Island of Books, translated into English by Rhonda Mullins, undulates between present and past, fact and fiction, faith and the fantastical.
Women and Power packs an impressive amount of information into a few pages, serving as an astute update on the issue of gender parity in Quebec and Canada. But beyond just taking stock, the book advances an appealing vision.
Fragment follows fragment like thoughts in a mind suspended between waking and sleeping, and again and again the book returns to the life of actor and Olympian Johnny Weissmuller. And yet this novel, the first part of a trilogy, isn’t a difficult read. The prose is translucent, flowing, beautifully translated from its original French by Dimitri Nasrallah.
After winning several prestigious awards in its original French, Catherine Leroux’s second novel, The Party Wall, expertly translated into English by Lazer Lederhendler, has been shortlisted for this year’s Giller Prize and for a Governor General’s Literary Award for translation. And deservedly so.
The key to understanding the French, according to Julie Barlow and Jean-Benoît Nadeau, authors of The Bonjour Effect: The Secret Codes of French Conversation Revealed, is to consider the gulf between communication and conversation. According to the Canadian duo, the French do not communicate; they converse. And when they do so, they may deliberately provoke controversy, they may avoid admitting they don’t know something, and they may even say no when they mean yes
