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.
By Sarah Lolley
Reviews
Neighbourhood: Designing a Liveable Community, the latest book by Avi Friedman, begins with a two-part question for the reader: think about a neighbourhood you like, then about why this is so.
By Yutaka Dirks
Manon Tremblay’s 100 Questions About Women and Politics digs into why achieving a balanced representation of men and women has been so difficult. The title is literal: the volume is framed as a hundred questions, followed by mini-essay responses that parse women’s participation in global government, as citizens and as officials.
By Emily Raine
Some novels hold their secrets tightly, leaving the reader to fumble in the darkness for any sense of where the book is leading them, while others let flow a glut of detail that can overwhelm and at times obscure what’s happening beneath the surface. Montreal writer David Turgeon manages to do both simultaneously in The Supreme Orchestra.
By Dean Garlick
In her memoir, In Search of Pure Lust, Lise Weil shares a history of self-discovery, led primarily by her lesbian identity, and paints a constellation lit up by a life lived relationally.
By Sruti Islam
With Mayonnaise, the second book of the 1984 trilogy, the poet and novelist Richard Brautigan becomes Rivages's central fixation. Among Plamondon's forest of factoids about Camus, General Jodl, and Saint Antoine, about the Remington Rifle Company and the Singer Sewing Machine, Charlie Chaplin and Vladimir Nabokov, Brautigan emerges as a commanding influence.
By Vince Tinguely
Just like its namesake street, Abla Farhoud’s newly translated novel is populated with memorable characters from all walks of life. Young and old, settled and transient, the characters weave in and out of each other’s lives, inhabiting a modern, multicultural society that shares its neighbourhood with a thriving but insular community of Hasidic Jews. In brief, vivid chapters, Farhoud provides glimpses into the lives of the Montreal residents who inhabit Hutchison Street, which “does not separate Outremont from Mile End, as you might think; it brings them together.”
By Rebecca Morris
The second graphic novel by young Chicago artist Nick Drnaso, Sabrina, dissects the parallel dimension created by these real-world lies and conspiracies, using it as the backdrop for a story about young people reeling from a tragic act of violence.
By Jeff Miller
A simple image served as the starting point for Montreal-based author Rawi Hage’s fourth novel, Beirut Hellfire Society. On a balmy morning in early September, he describes that image to me over coffee at a busy café in Mile End. “Someone standing on a balcony above the road to the cemetery. Simple.”
By Carly Rosalie Vandergriendt
What is happening now, here, to us? The question recurs throughout Melissa Bull’s first collection of short fiction, The Knockoff Eclipse, which could double as an index of quotidian humiliations and indignities. The answer, it seems, requires that we learn to recognize and name injustice where and when it occurs.
By Paige Cooper
It doesn’t take long for the reader to learn a little something about Kathy Dobson. In the first pages of her memoir Punching and Kicking: Leaving Canada’s Toughest Neighbourhood, she makes it clear that she’s not afraid to hold a grudge.
By Erin MacLeod
The notion of children – the children we raise, the children we lose, and the children we once were – threads through both Fragments, a collection of short stories by Maloose, and In Every Wave, a novella by Charles Quimper.
By Danielle Barkley