What anxiety grips Petites Cendres as he runs towards the sea in the sunshine on a warm tropical morning? Shouldn’t he be reassured by the thought that he now lives at the Acacia Gardens, a comfortable home where all find care, understanding, and healing? How can Fleur, the young musical prodigy, listen to the diabolical confessions of Wrath, the fugitive priest, without shuddering? And, can Daniel the writer finish his novel, the one he has been working on for twenty years, despite his sensitivity and empathy for all creatures, even if they are the most humble, like the lizard he inadvertently crushed under his sandal?With this latest novel, Marie-Claire Blais once again gives us a vibrant portrait that embraces the span of life  from birth to death and beyond. Her characters question their purpose and what will come after, as they are confronted by evil that lives and that has taken root.

The Acacia Gardens (Soifs Cycle, 7)

Literature & Fiction

BLAIS, Marie-Claire

Literary

Arachnide Editions

The latest from Governor General’s Literary Award winner Perrine Leblanc is a mesmerizing story about the disappearance of three young women and a deeply disturbing portrait of a small town gone bad. In between the mountains and the sea, on the north shore of the Baie des Chaleurs, there’s a village called Malabourg. The village is surrounded by all the usual features of the region: a river with wild salmon, a stretch of the national highway, and a coniferous forest. But Malabourg has one unusual feature: in the heart of the forest there’s a lake the kids call the tomb.” It’s the place where three young women have disappeared, one by one. As rumours and allegations spread through the village, Alexis and Mina struggle to make sense of the tragedies before deciding the only way to forget is to leave. Alexis relocates to France to learn how to compose perfume and Mina moves hundreds of kilometres away from the sea. But, in spite of the distance, Alexis and Mina can’t forget Malabourg, or each other. Unfolding along the beautiful, rugged landscape of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, The Lake is the gripping story of the disappearance of three young women, the unsettling aftermath, and the search for life beyond the limits of a small town.

The Lake

LeBlanc, Perrine

There’s something extraordinary about Thomas Langlois.Thomas is a young boy growing up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, with a French-Canadian father, Albert, and an American mother, Laura. But beyond the fact that he lives between two cultures and languages, there’s something else about Thomas that sets him apart: he was born on February 29.Before Albert goes on a strange quest to find out more about their mysterious relative, Aimé Bolduc, he explains to Thomas that he will only age one year out of every four and he will outlive all of his loved ones.Thomas’s loneliness grows and the years pass until a terrible accident involving a young girl sets in motion a series of events that link the young girl and Thomas to Aimé Bolduc ― a Civil War–era soldier and perhaps their contemporary.Spanning three centuries and set against the backdrop of the Appalachians, from Quebec to Tennessee, The Longest Year is a magical and poignant story about family history, fateful dates, fragile destinies, and lives brutally ended and mysteriously extended.

The Longest Year

GRENIER, Daniel

Unwilling to endure a culture of silence and submission, and disowned by her family, Nadia leaves her native Tunisia in 1984 amidst deadly violence, chaos, and rioting brought on by rising food costs, eventually emigrating to Canada to begin her life.
More than twenty-five years later, Nadia’s daughter Lila reluctantly travels to Tunisia to learn about her mother’s birth country. While she’s there, she connects with Nadia’s childhood friends, Neila and Mounir. She uncovers agonizing truths about her mother’s life as a teenager and imagines what it might have been like to grow up in fear of political instability and social unrest. As she is making these discoveries, protests over poor economic conditions and lack of political freedom are increasing, and soon, Lila finds herself in the midst of another revolution ― one that will inflame the country and change the Arab world, and her, forever.
Weaving together the voices of two women at two pivotal moments in history, the Tunisian Bread Riots in 1984 and the Jasmine Revolution in 2010, Hope Has Two Daughters is a bracing, vivid story that perfectly captures life inside revolution.

Hope Has Two Daughters

Mazigh, Monia

Tessa is a thirty-seven-year-old real estate agent living in Montreal. She adores her husband and three young sons, but she’s deeply unhappy and questioning the set of choices that have led to her present life. After a surprising run-in with Francis, her ex-boyfriend and first love, Tessa arranges to see him. During the three days before their meeting, she goes about her daily life ― there’s swimming lessons, science projects, and dirty dishes. As the day of her meeting with Francis draws closer she has to decide if she is willing to disrupt her stable, loving family life for an uncertain future with him. With startling clarity and emotional force, Fanny Britt gives us a complex portrait of a woman and a marriage from the inside out.

Hunting Houses

Humor & Entertainment

Britt, Fanny

Humor

The latest work in internationally acclaimed author Marie-Claire Blais's masterful novel cycle, A Twilight Celebration examines the prophetic side of the writer and the burden that falls to him in a world whose fate is yet to be determined. Daniel, a middle-aged novelist and loving father alienated from one of his sons and unsure how to care for his daughter, is on his way to an international conference of writers. The gathering is to be held in the forest above a mountain village of a strangely dreamlike nature. In the twilight of the festival's setting, dreams, memories, nightmares, and dark forebodings meld in Daniel's unsettled but deeply sympathetic consciousness: He is haunted by pressing existential questions: What is to be done? What are his responsibilities as a father, as a friend -- and as a writer? As Daniel confronts his own vanities, as he recalls the activism but also the disappointments and betrayals of friends and colleagues -- as he contends with, above all, the fears and aspirations of his children in times marred by apocalypse, he asks, ultimately, what can be done? In what may well be the most beautiful and disturbing of her novels, Marie-Claire Blais leads us on a heady, spellbinding journey through an interconnected world in which the artist strives to divert humankind's headlong rush towards a terrible destiny. Here is a world in which friends and strangers, the living, the dead and those not yet born, are inextricably bonded by their often flawed but always splendid humanity. Yet again, Blais captivates with her urgent concerns, irrepressible empathy, and singular idiom: A Twilight Celebration is an astonishing literary accomplishment.

A Twilight Celebration (Soifs Cycle, 8)

Jerome Lupien ― libidinous, unscrupulous, and fresh out of university ― is ambitious and at loose ends. Whether on a hunting trip in the woods, on an escape planned in good faith to Cuba, or seeking to make his way in Montreal, Jerome cannot help but be embroiled in misadventures and underworld escapades. He is conned by the devious ― a hunting guide, a low-life car salesman, and, ultimately, a well-to-do political lobbyist profiting from the city’s infamously corrupt partnership of politicians wielding remunerative contracts and the construction firms in cahoots. The unwitting (though frequently culpable) young man is enrolled, whether he knows it or not, in an unconventional and criminal school. And the education is singular, not only for Jerome, but also the reader.
The young man’s heady journey provides ― as only Yves Beauchemin can do ― an extraordinary, full, and trenchant portrait of class variety. Here is a mordant piece of social satire that is a marvelous entertainment and wonderfully traditional narrative too.

The Accidental Education of Jerome Lupien

Beauchemin, Yves

As the 40th anniversary of La Nuit de la poésie in Montreal approaches, playwright Robert Lepage is invited to recite Michèle Lalonde’s seminal poem “Speak White” from memory on the special night. After agonizing hours spent attempting to memorize the piece, Lepage finds himself unable to recall a single line. In a last effort he decides to employ a mnemonic device dating back to ancient Greece called the Memory Palace ― a technique of imagination and association. Lepage’s Memory Palace is 887 Murray Avenue, the apartment block where he grew up. Winding his way around the rooms of the building and the lives of the tenants therein, Lepage guides the reader through a world of recollections of 1960s Quebec, the decade that shaped the province’s cultural and political consciousness. A mesmerizing and multifaceted glimpse into the realm of memory, 887 is a tour of culture and community in 1960s Quebec through one masterful artist’s remarkable, boundary-defying perspective.

Lepage, Robert

Dramas & Plays

In the spirit of Bridget Jones’s Diary, Marie-Renée Lavoie’s Autopsy of a Boring Wife tells the hysterically funny and ultimately touching tale of forty-eight-year-old Diane, a woman whose husband leaves her and is having an affair because, he says, she bores him. Diane takes the charge to heart and undertakes an often ribald, highly entertaining journey to restoring trust in herself and others that is at the same time an astute commentary on women and girls, gender differences, and the curious institution of marriage in the twenty-first century. All the details are up for scrutiny in this tender, brisk story of the path to recovery. Autopsy of a Boring Wife is a wonderfully fresh and engaging novel of the pitfalls and missteps of an apparently “boring” life that could be any of ours.

Autopsy of a Boring Wife

Lavoie, Marie-Renée

Humor & Satire

Back Roads

Michaud, Andrée A.

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