The fifth novel in the Desrosiers Diaspora series from Québécois national treasure Michel Tremblay.

It’s May 1922, and preparations are in full swing for the marriage of Nana and Gabriel, which will take place the following month. There’s just one problem: Nana’s wedding dress has yet to be bought. Nana’s mercurial mother, Maria, torn bet …

Bestselling author Alice Livingstone is dead. She leaves her philosopher husband, Antoine, to deal with her legacy, towards which he feels increasingly estranged. Confronted with his wife’s much-reported disappearance, Antoine revisits their past relationship: open and liberal on the outside, but constrained and deviant on the inside. The news o …

Wanting Everything presents the collected works of Vancouver writer Gladys Hindmarch. In addition to reproducing newly revised editions of her book-length works (The Peter Stories, A Birth Account, and The Watery Part of the World), the volume collects unpublished works of prose as well as correspondence, criticism, oral history interviews, and occ …

At the crossroads at the end of childhood, Nana faces the hectic passing of her adolescence and the arrival of new responsibilities as her grandmother Joséphine approaches her last hours. To calm the storm, Nana reads the enthralling tales of Josaphat-the-Violin – a returning character in Tremblay’s Plateau-Mont-Royal Chronicles. Three of Josa …

Formally inventive, Simon Brousseau’s Synapses orchestrates a series of beautifully crafted literary snapshots, each involving a different character, eloquently presented using a sole, twisting and turning, stylistically accomplished sentence written in the second-person singular. Brousseau depicts a vast society of differing psyches and souls, a …

A delightful collection of seventy miniature fictions and comics riffing on the theme of happiness, The Great Happiness offers a series of lively antidotes to the current climate of doom. Some of the book’s miniatures are narratives with a twist, others are imaginative flights, such as the recently dead experimental novelist “sitting in” on …

This biography of George Bowering, first Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate, reveals the intimate, intellectual, and artistic life of one of Canada’s most prolific authors, offering an inside look at the people and events at the centre of the country’s literary and artistic avant-garde from the 1960s to the present.

A distinguished novelist, p …

Heartily sincere, human, and compassionate, Around Her is a multifaceted novel that explores, through the words and reflections of a large community of characters, the bonds that unite us, and love in all of its manifestations – the love that one finds, that one loses, destroys, desires, or recovers.

In the mid-1990s, a sixteen-year-old girl, secr …

Almost Islands is a powerfully introspective memoir of the author’s friendship with legendary Canadian poet Phyllis Webb – now in her nineties and long enveloped in silence – and his regular trips to see her. It is an extended meditation on literary ambition and failure, poetry and politics, choice and chance, location, colonization, and clim …

Susan Crean’s memoir Finding Mr. Wong chronicles her effort to piece together the life of the man she knew as Mr. Wong, cook and housekeeper to her Irish Canadian family for two generations. Reminiscing, Crean writes, “I grew up in Mr. Wong’s kitchen …”

A Chinese Head Tax payer hired by Crean’s grandfather in 1928, Wong Dong Wong remaine …

From the author of Into the Sun and Vandal Love, acclaimed for “prose that’s both lyrical and gritty, able to evoke big emotions with exquisite intimacy” (O, The Oprah Magazine), White is a riveting novel that explores whiteness, modern humanitarianism, and the lies of American exceptionalism and white supremacy.

Assigned to write an exposé o …

Set between 1913 and 1963 in one of Montreal’s well-known, upper-middle-class suburban neighbourhoods, Martine Desjardins’s The Green Chamber is a fast-paced, highly atmospheric, riveting novel that chronicles the decline of a wealthy French-Canadian family over the course of three generations.
Every house has its secrets, but none hides them …

This award-winning novel by playwright Wadji Mouawad is a thriller and a road novel – written in the North African storytelling tradition in which events unfold from an animal point of view.

The novel opens with a brutal murder: the protagonist arrives home to find his wife lying in a pool of blood. Driven by grief and the need to find whoever d …

Arsenault’s Rabelaisian fantasy is a gothic tale of the macabre and the bizarre, of black magicians and alchemists, and of the life and times of Zora Marjanna Lavanko, the daughter of a brutish tripe-dresser who dies for love. This surreal novel is set in the murky fictional domain of the Fredavian Forest, in the very real province of Karelia, th …

A Crossing of Hearts continues Michel Tremblay’s Desrosiers Diaspora series of novels, a family saga set in Montreal during World War I.

August 1915. Montreal is stifled by a heat wave while war rages in Europe. The three Desrosiers sisters – Tititte, Teena, and Maria – had been planning a whole week of vacation in the mountains, to do nothin …

In this atmospheric, post–Cormac McCarthy western novel, four disparate characters criss-cross the desert in pursuit of an impossible ideal. Along the way, these wily characters captivate and intrigue as they seek the American dream in a lawless town in the 1860s.

Reverend Aaron is found lying unconscious on the dusty trail to a family farm somewh …

Award-winning author Meredith Quartermain’s second novel and seventh book, U Girl, is a coming-of-age story set in Vancouver in 1972, a city crossed between love-in hip and forest-corp square.

Frances Nelson escapes her small-town background to attend first-year university in the big city. "You’ve got to find the great love," her new friend Dag …

It’s hard to worry about the future when you’re laughing at the hilarious absurdity of daily life.

The days we live go by like slugs eating their way through leaves; everything changes, yet nothing changes, and the years soon accumulate. Who doesn’t read their daily horoscope, searching for guidance about what’s to come, how to live? What …

When the electricity inexplicably goes out nationwide, the mundanities of life gradually shift to the rigours of survival. In this post-apocalyptic setting, an unnamed mechanic jumps into his beat-up car and drives east, journeying 4,736 kilometres to reach his dying father.

As the narrator’s journey becomes one of essentials – gasoline, fresh w …

Singularly obsessed with his all-consuming passion for Anna, the object of his adolescent desire, the photographer Christophe Langelier is beside himself. Ten years ago, he failed the test of eating a bicycle for her as proof of his love and devotion. Since then, he has created a photographic catalogue of his only model, complete with a glossary, a …

It is the glorious second day of May, 1942. The sun is drawing the damp from earth still heavy with the end of a long Quebec winter, the budding branches of the trees along rue Fabre and in Parc Lafontaine of the Plateau Mont Royal ache to release their leaves into the warm, clear air heralding the approach of summer.

Seven women in this raucous Fra …

For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again is Tremblay’s homage to his mother, who nurtured his imagination, his reclusive reading habits and his love for the theatre and the arts, yet who did not live to witness the performance of Les Belles Soeurs—the first successful play written in joual with which Tremblay legitimized the Quebecois vernacular in …

Mend the Living is the story of a heart transplant, centred around Simon Limbeau, the boy whose heart is given, and his family.

Taking place within exactly twenty-four hours, the novel traces the thrill of an early-morning winter surf session, the terrible accident that follows, and all the urgency and compassion of the hospital workers, and shock …

Raise the windsock. Read the compass. Ride where the wind wills it.

Late 2010. From the end of fall to the beginning of winter, Daniel Canty becomes a wind seeker. Aboard the Blue Rider, a venerable midnight-blue Ford Ranger crested with a weathervane and a retractable windsock, he surrenders himself to the fluidity of air currents. The adventure …

Raise the windsock. Read the compass. Ride where the wind wills it.

Late 2010. From the end of fall to the beginning of winter, Daniel Canty becomes a wind seeker. Aboard the Blue Rider, a venerable midnight-blue Ford Ranger crested with a weathervane and a retractable windsock, he surrenders himself to the fluidity of air currents. The adventure …

Bambi and Me consists of 12 autobiographical pieces about how movies shaped the young life of Michel Tremblay, one of their biggest fans. Among others, he talks about Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Cinderella, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Parade of the Wooden Soldiers, Orphée and the Night Visitors and about how each led to his disco …

One of Canada’s greatest literary figures reflects on life at the centre of Quebec literary arts. Re-examining the influences of her early life in a large, rural Catholic family, Madeleine Gagnon not only explores her rejection of unexamined values as part of her intellectual development but also her refusal to be categorized by her gender.

Karl M …

The box closet was a real closet in the attic of the family house in Washington, D.C. in which Mary Meigs grew up. Bags and boxes of letters and diaries were found there after her mother’s death in 1958, and when Meigs read them she decided that they were the material for a book. In the course of reading her family’s letters and her mother’s …

As a way to draw visitors to their isolated fishing village on Quebec’s North Shore, the tourist bureau commissions a documentary film recreating life as it was lived there in the 1940s and 50s. To gather material for the project, the filmmaker is sent in search of Rose Brouillard, now an old woman but raised on an island just offshore by Onile, …

As a way to draw visitors to their isolated fishing village on Quebec’s North Shore, the tourist bureau commissions a documentary film recreating life as it was lived there in the 1940s and 50s. To gather material for the project, the filmmaker is sent in search of Rose Brouillard, now an old woman but raised on an island just offshore by Onile, …

In these quirkily imaginative short stories about writing and writers, the scrivener Quartermain (our “Bartleby”) goes her stubborn way haunted by Pauline Johnson, Malcolm Lowry, Robin Blaser, Daphne Marlatt, and a host of other literary forebears. Who is writing whom, these stories ask in their musing reflections – the writer or the written? …

In Birth of a Bookworm, Michel Tremblay takes the reader on a tour of the books that have had a formative influence on the birth and early development of his creative imagination. Included are his readings of and reactions to some of the great classics of world literature by such writers as the Comtesse de Segur, Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson …

It is the spring of 1963. The young Quebec author Marie-Claire Blais, bursting with energy and talent, has just won a coveted Guggenheim fellowship. She chooses Cambridge, Massachusetts, as the place where she will begin her writer’s apprenticeship with her mentor, Edmund Wilson.
American Notebooks is much more than a fascinating autobiographical …

Specially edited, updated, revised and rewritten by the author, and for the first time complete in one volume, Great Lakes Suite includes A Trip Around Lake Ontario, first published in 1988, as well as A Trip Around Lake Erie and A Trip Around Lake Huron, both of which were first published in 1980. These books have come alive in a remarkable way an …

The story continues … The second in Michel Tremblay’s new series of novels presents two very different lives. We meet Maria as she leaves the city of Providence, Rhode Island, pregnant and alone. Two years later, we also meet Maria’s older daughter, Rhéauna, as she disembarks the train at Windsor Station, having crossed the continent from he …

In this prequel within a sequel, Diminuenda discovers that she stands to win a vast inheritance from her estranged father, the inimitable Minor, if she travels into the past and "collects" a number of objets d’art.

The cheeky diva travels to classical Greece, becoming the subject of the very painting she must steal as well as the focus of a Platon …

From one of the most exciting novelists writing in France today comes Birth of a Bridge – the story of a handful of men and women of various backgrounds and classes, who assemble around the construction of a giant suspension bridge in Coca, a fictional city somewhere in a mythical and fantastic California.

Told on a sweeping scale reminiscent of c …

At age 41, Eddy is in existential extremis. He once had an enviable life—a wife he adored, a young son, a cozy suburban house surrounded by carefully planted and sculpted gardens, the luxury to pursue his passion and become a professional horticulturalist. Now he’s separated from his wife, estranged from his son, he’s let his garden grow wil …

A Matter of Gravity is about the forces that draw two men together. Hermann, an embalmer and doctor’s son, devotes himself to the dead to mask his disappointment that, unlike his father, he cannot cure the ­living. Hu is an ailing pianist who dwells in memories of past glory. Hermann displaces his drive for perfection and order onto his elderly …

Edgar, a timid, asocial thirty-something, witnesses the brutal rape of a young woman and subsequently bears the unconscious victim home. Haunted by the death of his overbearing mother, he pledges to act as the mysterious woman’s saviour. Gothic and darkly humorous, The Obese Christ explores the nebulous divide between Good and Evil, while demonst …

Edgar, a timid, asocial thirty-something, witnesses the brutal rape of a young woman and subsequently bears the unconscious victim home. Haunted by the death of his overbearing mother, he pledges to act as the mysterious woman’s saviour. Gothic and darkly humorous, The Obese Christ explores the nebulous divide between Good and Evil, while demonst …