Cecilia Keating

Villages in Cities: Community Land Ownership, Cooperative Housing, and the Milton Parc Story tracks the community resistance and solidarity that scuppered Concordia Estates, alongside looking at the efforts and achievements of cooperative housing movements worldwide. It’s an academic guide for communities that want to protect their neighbourhoods from the claws ofreal estate speculation and gentrification, a toxic pollutant that discharges urban renewal at the cost of displacing original inhabitants, according to editors Joshua Hawley and Dimitrios Roussopoulos.

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.

Rose & Poe, a novel by Montreal Gazette sports columnist Jack Todd, is a North American fable loosely based on The Tempest. It tells the story of Poe, a simple-minded, hunchbacked gentle giant with six fingers and six toes, and his doting mother Rose. The pair have a modest existence cleaning houses, making cheese, tending goats, and merrymaking in their local tavern in Belle Coeur County, a fictional region of New England surrounded by water on three sides and Quebec the other.

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.