Larry Tremblay’s Impurity is a literary mystery. Antoine, a middle-aged Montreal professor, grieves over the recent death of his wife, Alice, a bestselling novelist, as well as the suicide of his long-lost friend, Félix. An intellectual grump who’s always dismissed sentimentality, he struggles with the waves of emotion that wash over him as he tries to process this double loss.
Kate Wake is Canadian poet Mariianne Mays Wiebe’s first foray into fiction. Her heroine, Katie, is a solitary artist with a troubled past, and we follow her as she delves into her memories and family history.
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.
A simple coming-of-age narrative told in rhythmic prose, The Benjamenta College of Art follows Luca, a first-year student carving outa place for himself at the titular institution.
To the Boys Who Wear Pink is the story of a party. Revolving around a core of eight former self-identified kings of high school, the night is narrated through a string of twenty-four voices as each attendee is given a chance at the narrative auxiliary cable.
Born in Aarau, Switzerland, cartoonist Anna Sommer is the force behind The Unknown, translated from the German by Helge Dascher. The Unknown is Sommer’s fifth book, which was showcased as part of the 2018 Official Selection of Angoulême, France’s internationally renowned comics festival. This is no small feat, given that only five women cartoonists were among the forty-five bédéistes in the Official Selection.
The knot of urgent issues that ties together hunger, environmental crisis, and animal exploitation gets more tangled every day. Among its most visible strands is the question of the production and consumption of meat.
Frédérick Lavoie is a Quebec writer and journalist whose political engagement is deep-rooted: he once spent time in a Belarus prison for the offence of confronting corruption there. Hardly surprising, then, that he found his interest piqued by the republication in Cuba, after a decades-long absence, of Orwell’s 1984, and made three trips to the island to investigate. The result won the 2018 Governor General’s Literary Award for French-language Non-fiction in its first edition; now, no less timely for the lag, it gets its English translation.
In Stories of Women in the Middle Ages, independent scholar Maria Teresa Brolis seeks to introduce the lives of women in the Middle Ages by telling the story of sixteen women who lived between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries in France, Germany, Sweden, and Italy.
Triplex Nervosa Trilogy is a great read. Its three scripts – Triplex Nervosa, Rooftop Eden, and Famously – are packed with the kind of funny, fast, rollicking dialogue that makes me want to be a director, just so I can make actors read their lines eight ways. This is the twelfth play by multi-award-winning Montreal playwright, novelist, and journalist Marianne Ackerman.
