Sarah Lolley

Ready to lose yourself in a noirish detective novel? If so, Never Forget is your next read. The third installment in Martin Michaud’s Victor Lessard series is an immersive thriller full of darkness, loathing, and vengeance.

The highly readable noir crime novel The Birds That Stay – a first book from established playwright Ann Lambert – starts with one person strangling another in the frigid Quebec Laurentians.

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?

Smitten by Giraffe is very readable, even for those who don’t gravitate towards books about science. It can feel disjointed, jumping as it does from Dagg’s research to her feminist activism and back again, but it is a memoir, after all: life doesn’t move in a straight line, especially for trailblazers.

Check out the cryptic crossword written by Sarah Lolley for our summer issue!

Find out the answers to Sarah Lolley's cryptic crossword puzzle!

The worst writing advice Louise Penny ever got – to abandon any hope of seeing her work in print – came early in her career, back when she first decided to give creative writing a go. “There are a lot of people who went out of their way to tell me that I wouldn’t be published,” Penny recalls.

The protagonist of Heather O’Neill’s long-awaited second novel is nineteen- year-old Nouschka Tremblay: intelligent but directionless, poor despite her celebrity, and stuck in the well-worn rut of her relationship with her deadbeat twin brother, Nicolas

Why does a woman stay with a man who hits her? And what does it take for her to finally choose to leave? This fall, two ambitious novels by Montreal writers tackle those complex questions: So Much It Hurts, by Monique Polak, and Lily and Taylor, by Elise Moser.

Gevinson was just fifteen when she started Rookie magazine but she was already three years into her career as an internationally famous blogger. At age twelve, Gevinson started the fashion blog Style Rookie.

Our narrator is Hester Warnock, aged 56. She is cynical, pragmatic, unyielding, and a bit of a ball-buster.

Sylvia Weisler, age thirty-three, published writer of a book of poetry, is tackling a new subject in earnest. Her next book will be about newspaper-based personal ads, she has decided.