The latest addition to my website is Sylvain Trudel‘s Le Souffle de l’harmattan (The Harmattan Winds). Set in Quebec, our hero Hugues is a foundling, unsure of his origins, except he seems to have almond eyes. He is influenced by the poems of a deceased and fictitious poet called Desuet and a fellow orphan, Habeke … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Antonio Soler‘s El sueño del caimán (The Alligator’s Trap). Our unnamed hero is a Spaniard working as a receptionist in a hotel in Toronto. A customer – Luis Bielsa – arrives. Our hero recognises him but he does not recognise our hero. We gradually learn that our hero … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Tsering Yangzom Lama‘s We Measure The Earth with Our Bodies. This is a (semi-)autobiographical novel about a family and village that flee Tibet when the Chinese take over and what happens to them. The four narrators are Lhamo, a child at the time, her younger sister Tenkyi, Lhamo’s … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Xue Yiwei‘s 希拉里, 密和, 我 (Celia, Misoka, I). Our unnamed narrator is from China. He, his wife and daughter had migrated from China to Montreal, nominally to get a better education for the daughter. It had not worked out. The marriage was not happy and the wife could … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Christophe Bernard‘s La Bête Creuse [The Hollow Beast]. This is a very long, very funny novel, written in broad Quebecois dialect, about a family that may have a curse on them though, as we soon learn, it is possible that the curse is merely excessive consumption of alcohol. … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Nicole Lundrigan‘s Thaw. The novel is set in the small Newfoundland town of Cupboard Cove and tells the story of two people who live there, as well as of their families. Tilley Gover is a sensitive boy with a loving mother but an aggressive and macho father and … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Nicole Lundrigan‘s Unraveling Arva. Set in Newfoundland, Lundrigan’s home province, this novel tells the story of Arva House. Both parents drowned, her father, apparently, after having drunk too much and her mother by suicide. She is now looking after Old Man Crane, an elderly and sick man, when … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Rober Racine‘s Le Mal de Vienne [The Vienna Sickness]. The author of this novel, Rober Racine, is primarily known as a visual artist. He is also a composer and dramatist but has written five novels. This work is an entirely absurdist and anarchic novel, written by a man … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Gérard Bessette‘s L’incubation (Incubation). The novel is entirely narrated in stream-of-consciousness style by a man known as Lagarde, a librarian by profession. He is primarily telling the story Gordon Blackwell, his friend and an English teacher at the university in the small Canadian town of Narcotown. Gordon had … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Emily St. John Mandel‘s Station Eleven. This book has been shortlisted for the US National Book Award, with the winner to be announced 19 November. This is a post-apocalyptic novel, but don’t let that put you off. As you will see in my review, there are a already … Read more