Everything in Italy is “old and broken,” says Suzanna’s niece, encapsulating a motif in Keith Henderson’s latest novel. Suzanna can relate. It seems everything about her life in Montreal is crumbling, too. When her ex-husband threatens to curtail support payments, the newly divorced forty-two-year-old must scramble to find a job – no small task since she long ago abandoned her studies for motherhood and hasn’t worked outside the home since.
While Testament may find readers everywhere, it will be of particular interest here in Anglophone Montreal, where word of Vickie Gendreau’s extraordinary life and death may have already been heard. Midway through 2012, at the age of twenty-three, Gendreau was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour. Less than a year later, she had succumbed to it, but not before writing two books that would make her the darling, the shooting star, the fennec fox of Quebec literature.
The story that unfolds is a quick and enjoyable read. Seven Days Dead features an engaging cast of characters upon a captivatingly written landscape. To ride alongside Cinq-Mars in the proverbial passenger seat as he thinks through various scenarios and learns about the lives of the townspeople makes for a satisfying and entertaining rainy day read.
The Keys of My Prison is the latest Canadian noir thriller to be resurrected by the Ricochet Books imprint of Montreal’s Véhicule Press. Established in 2010 and curated by Brian Busby, the Ricochet series has brought such long-lost titles as Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street and Blondes Are My Trouble back into the public consciousness.
In just over a hundred pages, All That Sang is many things. It is a tale of two cities, opening with a subtle, cinematic description of the rooftops of Paris before leading the reader down into the streets, evoking a morning’s gathering activity. The other city is Toronto, which appears from time to time, usually in counterpoint to the French capital.
Tragedy can result from the most mundane detail in life,” a dramatist remarks about his own tale, in one of the nine stories in Montreal-based Xue Yiwei’s Shenzheners. One can easily imagine Xue making the same comment about his short fiction collection, originally written in Mandarin Chinese, and his first to be published in English.
Shhh ... silence is golden, so they say. No one puts this to the test like Candy, the coquettish auctioneer’s daughter in Mark Foss’s second novel – a darkly humorous tale of sibling rivalry and devotion.
John Goldbach’s third book, It Is an Honest Ghost, in some ways continues the formal and thematic explorations of his earlier work. The stripped-down prose and philosophical semi-speculation that marked his first story collection and his satirical noir novel The Devil and the Detective are present here, too. That noted, It is an Honest Ghost is no rehash; it provides new, and arguably more polished, takes on such concerns.
To beckon is to entice, to draw someone in. It may be an act of deception, but it is not an act of coercion. When someone is beckoned, he responds willingly. That is the difficult reality that lies at the heart of Matthew Murphy’s debut novel, A Beckoning War.
The opening catalyst of Sylvain Neuvel’s sci-fi thriller Sleeping Giants is a classic premise of the genre: something is where it shouldn’t – or can’t – be. A giant metal hand is accidentally found by an eleven-year-old girl in the Midwest. The hand appears to be a millennium older than the oldest known civilization in the Americas; the technology needed to create and move the hand barely exists now, let alone then.
What a thrill to follow a writer from promise to fulfillment. Alice Petersen’s debut collection of short stories won the 2012 QWF Concordia University First Book Prize and marked her as a young writer to watch. Her second collection, Worldly Goods, more than delivers.
An elaborately coiffed woman, an intricate tapestry, and a woodblock sinking ship on the cover promise a story of love, history, and war. And Louis Carmain’s Guano delivers assuredly on all counts. But there’s also an off-white splotch that closer inspection reveals to be bird shit, a commodity once valuable enough to spark the minor war that provides the backdrop for this unsanitized yet sparkling historical novel with a sly contemporary feel.
