Of course, there are MANY more wonderful English Quebec books...
Elise Moser's novel Because I Have Loved and Hidden It was published by Cormorant Books. She is currently president of the Quebec Writers' Federation, lives in Montreal, and reads a lot of English Quebec fiction.
Winner of the 1944 Governor General's Literary Award For Fiction.
Earth and High Heaven is, simply, a drama of human relationships — of two people in love who are confronted by the obstacle of racial intolerance — presented with such cutting truth, such fidelity to life, such compassion and understanding, that their problem becomes, i …
First published in 1944, there is nothing dated about it, in style or content. Graham creates a vivid picture of Montreal in wartime, deftly managing all manner of issues (sexism, anti-Semitism, Canadian/Quebec politics, cities versus “the regions”) without ever falling into didacticism or losing her focus on the human drama. Heroine Erika Drake (“of the Westmount Drakes”) is a riveting figure of intelligence, flair, and powerful integrity.
Shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award (gay debut fiction)
Shortlisted for a ReLit Award (best novel)
SHUCK (noun): the outer covering of a nut or of an ear of corn; the shell of an oyster or clam; something of little value SHUCK (verb): to peel off (as in clothing)
Shuck is the intense, dazzling diary of Jaeven Marshall, a quasi-homeless hustler who …
A fabulously sexy, intelligent, wild and sad novel. A young hustler inhabits the back room of a New York shoe store while struggling to feed himself, boost his porn-modelling career, and, oh yeah, write. Daniel Allen Cox is not burdened by shyness, coyness, or dullness in any form; his creativity throws sparks off every page of this slim, original, and very deep story.
Cockroach is as urgent, unsettling, and brilliant as Rawi Hage's bestselling and critically acclaimed first book, De Niro's Game.
The novel takes place during one month of a bitterly cold winter in Montreal's restless immigrant community, where a self-described thief has just tried but failed to commit suicide. Rescued against his will, the narrato …
This insect’s-eye view of Montreal, although it must reflect the daily experiences of millions of the city’s inhabitants, has rarely made its way into our fiction. Every surface is an edge, every door in the act of closing -- but our immigrant hero persists, hungry both for food and a meaningful life. He scuttles through walls to raid the refrigerators of the complacent bourgeois who, casually satisfied with their power, cannot begin to imagine his reality. Hage can. His forceful imagination and skilful storytelling propel us through emotional and physical gutters. No one comes out unscathed, least of all our protagonist, even as he finds a way to make a life.
O’Neill’s unique voice, with its studied insouciance and effervescent blend of nostalgic reminiscence and keen observation, carries the reader through this lively story of a bright, damaged girlhood. The drugs, pimps, and pubescent hookers do not evoke New York or even Toronto; they could only be here, inhabiting a gentrifying Plateau neighbourhood described with wit and sensitivity even as it is unmoored from real geography. Montreal, much like O’Neill’s tender main character Baby, is caught in the moment of becoming a new self.
A stunning drama of love and intrigue set against the backdrop of war in Yugoslavia, where power is used to manipulate and break people.
I saw what the mural was all about. The entire war was portrayed on it from the asylum's point of view. The tanks with predatory smiles, the civilians naked with zippers up their middles so the soldiers could open …
This book is full of striking images: poets who are also war criminals, a woman who wears a bulletproof shirt during sex, asylum inmates clinging to their refuge while supposedly sane people wage an insane war outside. This amazingly ambitious novel attempts to understand the violent collapse of the former Yugoslavia – and, by extension, the moral responsibility of each of us for the world we live in. Complicity is unavoidable -- and yet, so is love, and neither releases us from our responsibility to struggle for a better way to live in the world.
A brilliant, finely accomplished, and intensely moving novel about a very modern predicament: the malformed dysfunctional identity in the global village?
When Joshua “lair emerges from amnesia in a psychiatric hospital in Montreal, he must explore what makes him want to erase his identity; in the painful process that follows he is forced to relive …
Joshua Éclair, amnesiac, is in a Montreal mental hospital. As he gradually recovers his identity, memory by memory, the reader assembles the pieces of a much wider picture. Through the events of Joshua’s childhood on a fictional Caribbean island, a complex history of racial, sexual, and economic domination emerges. Reinforced on a daily basis within the individual lives of plantation owners, labourers, and the children who embody their many secrets and multiple shames, this history comes to life in a beautifully written story of one man’s struggle for wholeness.
