In the past decade, climate fiction has become a frighteningly relevant literary genre, with an increasing number of authors exploring the potentially apocalyptic consequences of climate change. In Fauna, first-time author Christiane Vadnais offers us ten interwoven tales about a world ravaged by pollution and floods, populated by strange nocturnal creatures and metamorphic parasites.
In 2007, Milton Ontario is a new arrival to Montreal. Exposed to Cohen’s songs in his high school English class in rural Saskatchewan, he became an instant fan and, lamentably, a poet. A really bad one, as humorously evidenced by the snippets of blank verse throughout the book. After years of dodging a career in the oil patch, Milton has come to his hero’s hometown to enlist in the Mile End bohemia.
Towners & Other Stories, Quirion’s debut collection, features a novella and eight short stories, all of which largely concentrate on masculinist aspects of Eastern Townships culture.
We’ve all found ourselves daydreaming of a better life, fantasizing about a time and place where our deepest desires have become reality. For some, the conditions of existence may call for a little more fantasizing than for others. This can certainly be said for the central character in Jean-Christophe Réhel’s new novel in English translation, Tatouine.
Published by Exile Editions, Amun: A Gathering of Indigenous Voices is a collection of ten different stories set in multiple epochs and contexts, offering glimpses of lives that provide a wider view and understanding of Indigenous experiences.
After months of stasis and waiting, the protagonist of If You Hear Me muses, “Everything still happens in the present tense.” The stark uncertainty of her situation – her husband has spent months in a coma, hovering somewhere between life and death – has made imagining a future impossible, while the happiness of their previous normal life becomes harder and harder to remember.
Joe Adler, the narrator of Matt Mayr’s new novel Things Worth Burying, is a stand-up guy. If this sounds like an old-fashioned label, that’s because Joe’s an old-fashioned guy. A logger in a small Northern Ontario town, he’s spent his life set in his ways and stuck in one place.
A number of words come to mind while reading Bertrand Laverdure’s newest novel in English translation, The Neptune Room: beautiful, messy, morbid, poetic, and, at times, problematic.
Larry Tremblay’s Impurity is a literary mystery. Antoine, a middle-aged Montreal professor, grieves over the recent death of his wife, Alice, a bestselling novelist, as well as the suicide of his long-lost friend, Félix. An intellectual grump who’s always dismissed sentimentality, he struggles with the waves of emotion that wash over him as he tries to process this double loss.
Kate Wake is Canadian poet Mariianne Mays Wiebe’s first foray into fiction. Her heroine, Katie, is a solitary artist with a troubled past, and we follow her as she delves into her memories and family history.
Ready to lose yourself in a noirish detective novel? If so, Never Forget is your next read. The third installment in Martin Michaud’s Victor Lessard series is an immersive thriller full of darkness, loathing, and vengeance.
A simple coming-of-age narrative told in rhythmic prose, The Benjamenta College of Art follows Luca, a first-year student carving outa place for himself at the titular institution.
