Pablo Strauss

Dalie Giroux asks important questions about history, colonialism, and Quebec identity.

Who Belongs in Quebec?: Identity Politics in a Changing Society closely examines recent political developments and landmark events in Quebec, including the 2018 election of the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) majority government, debates around Quebec’s Charter of Values, and the secularism law, Bill 21.

Sean Michaels’s second novel is about luck. The Wagers also casts a tender, incandescent light on ramshackle grocery stores, extended families, stand-up comedy, sibling rivalry, romantic and platonic love, art-making, and an unnamed city that looks uncannily like Montreal.

Expect neither Skil saws nor crowbars in Montreal writer and translator David Homel’s eighth novel: the “teardown” he explores with perspicacity is the mindset of a narrator who, like the older homes in his childhood neighbourhood, remains structurally sound but feels unjustly rendered worthless in a volatile, financialized new world order.

By now we know money can’t buy happiness. But why can’t it even bring reprieve from financial worry? Can anyone find freedom and meaning in our capitalist paradise, or is the human obsession with money pathological and insurmountable? These questions run through all twelve of the stories collected in Net Worth.

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.

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.

Named for its author’s hometown, Samuel Archibald’s debut short-story collection Arvida is a grab bag of family lore, tall tales, idle boasts, and dark secrets – the kind of stories usually told around a kitchen table or campfire before vanishing into the night air like smoke.