The storytelling tradition would never have become a tradition if people hadn’t been willing to work on variations of what came before, and in Sasquatch and the Green Sash, Henderson takes Sir Gawain and the Green Knight further afield than most would dare. Describing his project in the acknowledgements as “a hybrid thing, at once an adaptation, translation, and Canadianization,” he makes good on all three claims.
At the centre of Didier Leclair’s beautifully written and realized novel, This Country of Mine, is Dr. Apollinaire Mavoungou, a recent immigrant from an African country to Toronto. His professional qualifications still unrecognized, despite passing the required local exams, Apollinaire works at a call centre and moonlights illegally as a doctor to retain some semblance of his former life.
Diane Delaunais, the main character in Marie-Renée Lavoie’s novel Autopsy of a Boring Wife, is (despite the title) not at all boring. After Jacques, her husband of twenty-five years, unexpectedly leaves her and their empty nest near Quebec City for a younger woman, Diane’s equilibrium (if she ever had any) spirals out of orbit. Trying to regain her footing, she lurches from scene to scene in escapades often featuring her sympathetic friend Claudine.
Clicking into Place, by writer and improviser Jordan Moffatt, is a different kind of book – it’s a Bad Book, the first fiction title from the micro-press founded by Fawn Parker and Thomas Molander in 2018. The press’s mission is to “broaden the definition of ‘CanLit,’” and Moffatt’s flash fiction collection fits the bill – it’s unlike any CanLit I’ve read in recent memory – but not in the ways I expected.
The notion of children – the children we raise, the children we lose, and the children we once were – threads through both Fragments, a collection of short stories by Maloose, and In Every Wave, a novella by Charles Quimper.
For many lay readers coming to Vanessa R. Sasson’s powerfully imagined new novel Yasodhara, the nearest previous equivalent might be Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. A 1922 novel that told the tale of an acolyte in the time of Gautama Buddha, it achieved a grassroots revival as a travel- companion volume for counterculture seekers of the 1960s and 70s.
Catherine Leroux’s latest collection of stories inhabits a profoundly enigmatic space. Each tale revolves around the imagined life of a real woman – the so-called “Madame Victoria,” whose remains were found outside the Royal Victoria Hospital in 2001 and whose identity, despite thorough investigation, is still a mystery. Here, Leroux has taken this unsettling news bite as the starting point for twelve portraits of possible lives.
Since its publication in 2014, Eric Dupont’s La Fiancée américaine has sold more than sixty thousand copies in Quebec. Using sales figures as any kind of metric for artistic worth is a slippery slope, of course. But the number above is worth pondering for several reasons. Check the shelves in just about every household in Quebec with any inclination toward literary fiction and you will find a copy of Dupont’s novel. It’s the Thriller or ABBA’s Greatest Hits of its world, with a popular reach most serious writers stopped dreaming of decades ago.
In Licia Canton’s second collection of short fiction, generations of Italian-Canadians negotiate old-fashioned gender roles in a new country, sliding fluidly between different languages and cultures. Canton writes with profound empathy, conveying deep emotions and complex family dynamics through the memories, ambition, tenderness, and regrets hidden under the quiet surfaces of
her characters.
Land for Fatimah is a powerful tale about land ownership, dispossession, power, and poverty told through the eyes of four women. Veena Gokhale approaches these beefy topics with such detail, sophistication, and delicacy that it is clear the story is deeply rooted in her own time working in a non-governmental organization (NGO) in Tanzania.
By now we know money can’t buy happiness. But why can’t it even bring reprieve from financial worry? Can anyone find freedom and meaning in our capitalist paradise, or is the human obsession with money pathological and insurmountable? These questions run through all twelve of the stories collected in Net Worth.
