Hostage is the account, as told to Delisle, of how a Doctors Without Borders worker in Nazran, Russia, was kidnapped by Chechen rebels in 1997 and held for three months in an undisclosed location. And there, handcuffed to a radiator in a bare room with a boarded-up window, trying to maintain hope, is where we find Christophe André for most of this remarkable book’s 400-plus pages.
With the continuing popularity of Scandinavian noir, it was only a matter of time before someone tried their hand at outright Arctic noir. With her second novel Polynya, Montreal author Mélanie Vincelette gamely steps up to the plate with a murder mystery – of sorts – set in Nunavut.
In Tumbleweed, Josip Novakovich is equipped with a deep writer’s arsenal – a sharp eye for the telling detail, a subtly rhythmic prose style, and deadpan humour.
“Right words sound wrong,” Laura Broadbent opens in her latest book, In on the Great Joke. Borrowing Lao Tzu’s words, Broadbent explores this “wrongness” of language, its limits, mistranslations, and shortcomings.
Inspired by the Black Lives Canada Syllabus, activist Robyn Maynard explores the past, present, and future of Black writing and resilience in Montreal.
Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars by Kai Cheng Thom is a book that uses its warmhearted critique of the conventional tropes of the trans memoir as a way to reinvent those very tropes in fabulist Technicolor.
In Never, Again, set during the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, a child protagonist not yet fettered by the burdens of history lends the novel its greatest strength: a subtle balance between everyday ubiquity and unimaginable horror.
Daniel Grenier’s ambitious debut novel spans thousands of kilometres across North America and hundreds of years of history as it reflects on the nature of memory, love, and mortality.
