Kimberly Bourgeois

Heather O’Neill’s own bold and bewitching words, steeped in symbolism, are as exciting to unpack as an epic dream.

In Morris' novel, friendship is a life-saving light on a young woman’s quest for truth in the aftermath of sexual assault. 

Carmela Circelli’s debut novel is a psychological, philosophical, and often poetic page-turner thrumming with musical mentions.

Caroline Dawson digs up and grieves such disowned fragments of self in her gripping autobiographical novel.

Felicia Mihali skillfully pairs the exquisite with the repellent, arresting the reader with vivid descriptions that engage all the senses.

Ann-Marie MacDonald’s magnificent fourth novel is a hefty read, yet never does it feel too long.

Kathleen Winter’s ravishing reimagining of Dorothy Wordsworth glistens with healing potential and gorgeous poetry.

"The Sleep of Apples is a love song to my home city: Montreal,” writes Ami Sands Brodoff in her acknowledgements. And what a potent number she delivers in this emotionally charged collection of linked short fiction!

Celebrated crime writer and two-time Governor General’s Literary Award winner Andrée A. Michaud's Mirror Lake is at once funny and sad, poetic and gritty, meaningful and absurd.

Forty-five-year-old Margot, who’s “never risked anything greater than a found dollar on a lottery ticket,” has ditched her long-held career as an antique firearms dealer in an attempt to sidestep a midlife crisis.

Sometimes things need to fall apart in order to come together. At least that seems true for Beatrice Rose (Bea), the heroine of Claire Holden Rothman’s third novel, Lear’s Shadow. As Bea pulls herself from the wreckage of a messy breakup and cares for her ailing father, readers are invited to contemplate the underside of social masks.

In this deeply layered, poetic, and empathic psychological novel, James Wolfe reappears – in 2017. Traumatized James, or “Jimmy,” wanders the streets of Montreal and Quebec, homeless and haunted by war, his loneliness palpable as he tries to come to grips with the plastic facades of modern life, and continues to grieve his lost eleven days.

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.

Women and Power packs an impressive amount of information into a few pages, serving as an astute update on the issue of gender parity in Quebec and Canada. But beyond just taking stock, the book advances an appealing vision.

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.

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.

From the very first page, Police Wife sensitizes readers to the horrors of domestic violence, highlighting the extra challenges faced by victims of officer-batterers, such as when 911 calls are answered by the aggressor’s colleagues.

Like a magic wand, Dubé’s poetic pen mesmerizes with sumptuous metaphors while beauty mingles seductively with recklessness and wreckage. Dubé’s sixth book, an addition to his already noteworthy contributions to gay literature, serves up stories that are often surreal, sometimes supernatural, and never static.

Winter expands her focus well beyond gender identity to study other triggers of alienation, including ageing, homelessness, and poverty. Stunning beauty intertwines tough emotional truths, while sucker-punch endings leave you reeling. Meanwhile, an oddly alluring hue of loneliness tinges the collection and leaks into her non-fiction title.

In My October, Hannah is struck by “the voices” in Roy’s classic, finding them all “so closely observed that it was easy to forget they were fictional.” The same could be said of Rothman’s well-orchestrated choir of characters, thanks to which My October rings true.

Echoing her heroines’ no-nonsense manner, Charney’s writing is spare, unsentimental, and greatly propelled by dialogue.

Carmine Starnino may be a tough critic, but he’s definitely no “lazy bastard.” I didn’t inquire directly during our recent email interview, but I suspect he’s no nervous Nellie either.

The end result is a philosophical, metafictional work whose form is as quirky as its characters.

To catnap or not to catnap, that is often the life-or-death question in Tjia’s latest creation.

What constitutes a person other than a collection of memories, both those acquired in one’s own lifetime and those passed down through generations? If you strip someone of his memories, do you strip him of his soul? And if memories are the very building blocks of humanity, who decides what to construct?

Do not create anything,” famously wrote Bob Dylan in his poem “Advice for Geraldine on her Miscellaneous Birthday”: “it will be misinterpreted. / it will not change. / it will follow you the rest of your life.”