In some ways, Martine Delvaux’s White Out is an origin story and a family history. However, as the title indicates, it is a narrative dominated by blankness, where absence matters as much as presence. The absence of the narrator’s father functions as a central void, which threatens to consume anything that is solid and tangible about her life. The text is, by necessity, a story without a climax or resolution; it is driven less by plot than by a series of meditations and unanswered questions. Nonetheless, the compulsive energy of the language, translated into English by Katia Grubisic, is such that it hits the reader like an avalanche or a blinding blizzard. There is little to grasp on to, but the reading experience is consuming.
Juliana Léveillé-Trudel’s recently translated novel Nirliit opens with a trip North to Salluit, a “postcard paradise” that is just past Puvirnituq, the “Most Violent Community in Nunavik.” Nirliit means snow geese in Inuktitut, and the narrator identifies with these birds, for she too travels north in the summer and south in the winter. In the opening, the narrator returns to learn that her friend Eva has disappeared. From its first pages, Nirliit resuscitates, albeit somewhat knowingly, the tropes of colonial literature: The disappearing Indian. The fucked up, drunken Indian. The stoic one. The gone.
If you seek something harrowing and suffused with poetic elegance, this may be the book for you. With a sensual realism that at times bleeds into fantasy, Awumey lays before us the life of West African playwright Ito Baraka.
Early in Leila Marshy’s novel The Philistine, the protagonist, Nadia, abruptly declines to board a return flight from Egypt to Canada and arranges instead for an open-ended ticket allowing her to stay indefinitely. What looks at first glance like a refusal to go home becomes far more ambiguous because of how the novel unsettles the categories of home and away, travelling and arriving, belonging and exile.
In Blue Lake, history and tragedy threaten to repeat themselves in each generation, with each character “doubled and shadowed by past, present and future.” In this community, it’s considered perfectly reasonable to camouflage your cabin with paintings of trees or to cultivate a garden of poisonous plants, fertilized with the ashes of family and friends.
What do we do in a crime novel where there is no hard-boiled detective working the case? No tenacious cop playing cat-and-mouse with the killer, no small-town spinster shrewdly putting together clues? What do we do when we walk into the story after the thrill of the chase?
When Tessa, a jaded Montreal real estate agent, meets her new client Évelyne, she is quick to diagnose the situation. “I do this week in, week out,” she says. “Guessing each client’s household drama has become second nature to me.” Divorce, of course, tops the list, and Évelyne, to whom Tessa mentally assigns a blubbering, “suffocating” husband, is no exception. So begins Hunting Houses, the English translation of Quebec playwright and translator Fanny Britt’s first novel, Les maisons.
"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.
