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.
By Sarah Lolley
Reviews
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.
By Carly Rosalie Vandergriendt
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.
By Emilie Kneifel
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.
By Heather Leighton
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.
By Elise Moser
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.
By Ian McGillis
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.
By Mélanie Grondin
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.
By Cherie Pyne
This summer's selection of poetry.
By Cora Siré, Rachel McCrum, and Virginia Konchan
This summer's selection of books for young readers.
By B. A. Markus
Borderline is the first book by Montreal Francophone writer Marie-Sissi Labrèche. Released in 2000, the work won a cult following and went on to be adapted into a film of the same name, whose script won the 2009 Genie Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Borderline is a semi-autobiographical narrative that follows a young woman named Sissi as she navigates Montreal in the late nineties, engaging in risky behaviours, struggling with mental illness, and reflecting on her traumatic past.
By Nour Abi-Nakhoul
Hungarian-born, Montreal-based writer Endre Farkas is an award-winning poet. In 2016, he published the semi-autobiographical novel Never, Again, about a family of Holocaust survivors in Hungary. Home Game is the follow-up, with the protagonist Tommy Wolfstein now a teenager in Montreal amid the throes of 1960s social upheaval. Tommy, a star soccer player, gets the opportunity to travel to his homeland for a game, forcing him to confront the spectre of his family’s past.
By Malcolm Fraser