"For some, this was a time of moral clarity; for others, moral clarity was a lie,” writes Jocelyn Parr in her debut historical novel. The time she refers to spans the period between 1921 and 1929 in Moscow. The aftermath of the Russian Revolution and Civil War have created a world in which experiences seem at once more vivid and more stark, especially for the young. In the novel’s opening scene, the protagonist, Tatiana, meets her future husband Sasha after an explosion strikes.
Behind The Eyes We Meet, Mélissa Verreault’s second novel and her first to appear in English, translated by Arielle Aaronson, isn’t what it initially seems. Rooted in contemporary milieus and conflicts, the first of three parts follows Emmanuelle, a twenty-nine-year-old graphic designer who lives in Hochelaga and goes by Manue.
Tom Abray’s Where I Wanted to Be opens with its hero Will Gough bombing his first performance review at the Ville Saint-Laurent plastic packaging company where he works. The scene is debatably the most eventful and jarring of the whole novel, which then gently patters over six months of Will’s life.
Guillaume Morissette’s second novel The Original Face follows twentysomething protagonist Daniel Kerry’s travels through the contemporary gig economy, dramatizing the state of precarious employment experienced by many young people today. Loosely based on events from the author’s life, The Original Face is written in the flat style Morissette developed in his 2014 debut, New Tab, which was shortlisted for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award.
On March 30, 1827, a dreadful murder occurred in Montreal. Someone slipped the muzzle of a shotgun through the open window of a house on Saint-Joseph Boulevard and blasted the unsuspecting victim in his own parlour. The perpetrator was unknown. The victim, however, was a well-known citizen, Robert Watson, the inspector of flour – His Majesty’s inspector of flour, no less – for the city and district of Montreal.
Set in London, the story finds police detective Colin McDermott investigating the mysterious death of a young woman who fell in front of a bus in a crowded public intersection. It seems like an accident, but a few details set off McDermott’s suspicions, and soon he’s investigating at St. Gregory’s College, where the young woman recently enrolled. Putting together an investigative team made up of the seemingly incompatible Ridley, a crusty male officer approaching retirement, and Quinn, a smart young female officer, McDermott is soon facing a complicated web of possible motives and suspects, including one that reaches into his own past.
In the beginning, secrets were solicited through Web ads and in public places around Québec City. These became a series of monologues performed in a park called Chaque automne j’ai envie de mourir. This project turned into a book of short stories of the same name by Véronique Côté and Steve Gagnon. The latest iteration, I Never Talk About It, is an experiment in translation that sets out to explore the marks translators leave on a text.
The title of Lesley Trites’s debut work serves as a useful metaphor for the relationship between the eleven short stories included in the collection. While the tiers of a cake may have different flavours, they also fit together, with unity often created by the decoration. Likewise, Trites’s stories echo with distinct styles and voices.
It's the middle of the night. Your vessel: a worn, wooden, overcrowded fishing boat. Even if you survive the Mediterranean’s choppy waters and reach foreign land, your life as a refugee is destined for danger. Given the risks, just how desperate would you need to be to climb aboard? This is the kind of question that floods your heart as you dip into Montreal author Ami Sands Brodoff’s timely new novel, In Many Waters.
In Suzanne, first published in French as La femme qui fuit (the woman who flees), Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette’s grandmother takes her place in a long roster of literary missing persons – from April Raintree to Amy, the Gone Girl – who form, through absence, the driving force of a novel. But rather than build her narrative around a grandmother-shaped hole, Barbeau-Lavalette has chosen to construct Suzanne Meloche in fiction.
For a book peopled with characters who feel life is empty of meaning, who rely on pilfered pills and large quantities of alcohol for fun, who spend money as fast as they can acquire it in a desperate search for some kind of satisfaction, Listening for Jupiter and its denizens are unexpectedly sweet and appealing.
A first novel without a single misstep, In a Wide Country showcases Robert Everett-Green’s unfaltering ability to fashion resonant set pieces from the raw materials of human memory – a striking image, a telling object, a colour, a snippet of dialogue, and healthy doses of hope and humiliation.
