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Liz, born in China and raised in Montreal, is about to land in Germany for a summer physics internship at the end of her freshman year. Eager for a new beginning, she hopes to break free of her unrealized childhood dream of becoming a pianist, a dead-end romantic relationship, and the tug of war between her Chinese and Canadian identities. In Germany, she meets fellow intern Haider, an Indian Muslim from Toronto, and they fall in love against expectations. But summer doesn't last forever. Once they return to Canada, culture clashes and family disapproval threaten to pull them apart. As her sense of self is pushed dangerously close to a tipping point, Liz must summon the courage to survive the chaos that her life has become.

Connected via the fictional town of St Anne' s, a community along Nova Scotia's western shore, each story takes its title from the children's rhyme Counting Crows. One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a message, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never to be told. Within each tale an individual (often from the same family, always from the same town) will note the number of crows in their midst and recall the poem as it relates to the prophecy and the story at hand. Between the last century and the current one, the characters (for the most part, women) walk a shifting landscape carved out by war, poverty, and patriarchal expectations. Beneath the gaze of a small town and these intelligent birds whose memories are unforgiving, we are as close as a heartbeat to the souls upon these pages.

In the fiery political debates in and about Italy, silence reigns about the country's colonial legacy. Reducing European colonial history to Britain and France has effectively concealed an enduring phenomenon in Italian history that lasted for 80 years (1882 to 1960). It also blots out the history of the countries it colonized in Northeastern Africa. Francesco Filippi challenges the myth of Italians being " nice people" or " good" colonialists who simply built roads for Africans. Despite extensive historiography, the collective awareness of the nations conquered and the violence inflicted on them remains superficial, be it in Italy or internationally. He retraces Italy's colonial history, focusing on how propaganda, literature and popular culture have warped our understanding of the past and thereby hampered our ability to deal with the present. Filippi's unique approach in which he deftly pits historical facts against popular myths provides a model that can be adapted to countries everywhere, including the United States and Canada.

Two young writers who grew up in the shadow of the huge chimney of a copper refinery in Rouyn-Noranda speak out. They refuse to be lulled by the songs of gold that have silenced the people who built the city and enriched the foundry owners for many decades. They subtly and poetically illustrate the love-hate relationship they maintain with the " piles of slag and copper." This passionate dialogue has hit Quebec bookstores like a tornado and will echo in mining towns across North America. The title is inspired by the Marguerite Duras book Hiroshima Mon Amour and the film by Alain Resnais.

Born during the Great Depression, Jean-Claude Morel is an Everyman, an ordinary Montreal construction worker who has built the city with his own hands, digging its metro, creating islands, and weaving expressways through the downtown core. But the progress has come at a cost: neighbourhoods have been razed, streets wiped off the map, and the Morel family expropriated. Teeming with life, Morel uncovers a story of Montreal that has been buried under years of glitzy urban renewal and modernization. This intricately constructed literary novel is a profoundly human portrait of one man and his time, a monument to a city, and a toast to days gone by.

Wendake, Odanak, Wô linak, Pointe-du-Lac, Kahnawake, Kanesatake, Akwesasne, Kitigan Zibi are communities located all along the St. Lawrence River valley and its tributaries. They have been home to descendants of the Huron-Wendat, Algonquin, Nipissing, and Iroquois nations. These First Nations have in common the fact that their ancestors were allies of the French and had converted to Christianity. Historians have ignored these nations described as " domiciled Indians" (" sauvages domicilié s" ) by the French administrators. Jean-Pierre Sawaya carefully studied how an alliance of such diverse " missions" was created, developed and conducted to become The Seven Nations of Canada. How did this confederation come about? Who took part and what were their roles? The answers are mined in the massive colonial archives. Seven Fires is original research at its best, combining detailed analysis and systematic investigation, that has enabled the author to dispel the tenacious colonial myth about irrational, submissive, and fatalistic Indigenous peoples. Readers will discover forward-looking people motivated by a deep desire for independence and solidarity.

Bloody Sunday (1972) catapulted the Irish " troubles" onto the world stage, exacerbating suspicion in US intelligence circles that the IRA might turn to the Soviets for guns. South Boston native Raymond Daly, just off a CIA stint in Laos, is sent to Ireland to re-establish a line running guns to the IRA. He deftly earns the trust of gunrunner Slowey, a tough money-making South Boston native, who introduces him to an IRA splinter group operating near Blacklion, a town bordering on Northern Ireland. Ray begins to manipulate Aoife, an Irish woman, in order to gain the trust of the community and embed himself in the organization. After the British Special Air Services raid a safehouse, Ray finds himself involved in executing an informant and his wife. But he also finds himself getting soft on some of those he was sent to infiltrate and becoming more like his cover, " an Irish American gunrunner with a romantic attachment to the Cause," and less like an obedient CIA operative. Events spiral, culminating in a shootout with the British army that compels Ray to make a Faustian decision on his future and that of Aoife and the others he was assigned to manipulate.

Chronicling the lives of a Balkan family, a people, a town and a nation, from dawn at the time of the first great War to dusk as the Cold War sputters to an end.

People ask themselves why cities exist? Can't there be other ways of organizing life on earth? Given the climate crisis and environmental concerns, how can we justify living in cramped quarters? Cities Matter answers those questions. Though Jane Jacobs is known mainly as an urbanist, Ramsay shows how important an economist she was, particularly with regards to cities and their economic relationships to nations and international trade. He has corralled much of Jane Jacobs' writings on economics, in a palatable and concise format. He also explains classical economic geography, such as central location theory, and Alfred Marshall's economies of agglomeration. Borrowing from Jane Jacobs' approach, he proposes real-life exercises for regular people wishing to compare suburban and urban living conditions, real estate investments, or transport-cost analysis for businesses. The Covid-19 pandemic has prompted some to predict the demise of cities. Will everybody continue to work from home and abandon city centres? Will the bucolic periphery take over from bustling and messy cities? Ramsay responds with a resounding NO, and posits that Jane Jacobs would too.

Tess has just moved to Montreal from Nova Scotia, and seeks to lose herself by involving herself in the lives of others. She befriends an older man while delivering meals to the elderly. Her interest in his past veers into obsession after furtively going through his photos and letters and "e;borrowing"e; his journal. Though fact and fiction are blurred, they reveal a man shaken by political polarization and repression in his Latin-American homeland. Tess learns about a young, passionate man in the 1970s forced to reconcile his love for a militant young woman and his dedication to his best friend whose family is on the other side of the political divide. As she delves deeper into Mr. the man's story, she questions her own life choices, emotions, and obsessions. Exploring cultural and personal memory, Almost Visible reflects on what can happen when a lonely person intervenes in another person's life.

Somewhere between the Sumida River, the Tsukiji fish market, and a contemporary art gallery, Vincent returns from Montreal to Tokyo, where his lover has passed away in tragic circumstances. So begins a sensual and disturbing tale of love and grief, of foxes, artists, and taxidermy.

Alfred Thomas Wood was nothing and everything. One hundred years before the Hollywood film The Great Impostor, Wood, the Great Absquatulator, roved through the momentous mid-19th century events from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to New England, Liberia, Great Britain, Ireland, Germany, Canada, the U.S. Mid-West, and the South. An Oxford-educated preacher in Maine and Boston, he claimed to be a Cambridge-educated doctor of divinity in Liberia, whereas neither University admitted black students then. He spent 18 months in an English prison. In Hamburg in 1854, he published a history of Liberia in German. Later, in Montreal, he claimed to have been Superintendent of Public Works in Sierra Leone. He served the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois as an Oxford-educated DD, then toiled in post-Civil War Tennessee as a Cambridge-trained MD. People who knew him couldn't wait to forget him. In his Foreword, Rapper Webster (Aly Ndiaye) compares Wood to a mid-19th-century Forrest Gump but also to Malcolm X, before Malcolm became political.

A serial killer is stalking the streets of Montreal, killing people apparently at random. Gilles and Annie team up to uncover the clues that link all the crimes and ultimately to solve them.

When Nicole Fortin whose goal is to be an Olympic swimmer sees her plan derailed, she goes to work for a jet engine manufacturer. The challenges are immense in the male-dominated workplace, but over the years she earns the respect of her fellow workers and leads them into a major labour dispute that could lead to a devastating dead end. Tangled workplace and family ties along with remarkable back stories add bite to this modern working class novel.

Visceral, surprising and surreal, these twelve stories from David Clerson move from the charged darkness of the woods to the urban underground, while characters set a course to see out the night.

In this hard-hitting anthology, Ishmael Reed and Carla Blank have invited a diverse group of informed and accomplished writers, both women and men, who are rarely heard to comment on the long-standing bigotry on Broadway towards many different ethnic minorities.

It's 1963 Jean-Yves Soucy is 18 and dreams of being a fire warden scanning the boreal forest from a fire tower. But he ends up at an equipment depot. To his delight he is located near the Cree community of Waswanipi. With two Cree guides, including a man named William Saganash, he will be canoeing through the lakes and rivers of the region.

On a warm August evening in 1905, a 12-year old boy is shot in the back and killed near the Orford Mountain Railway construction site in rural Quebec. The crime is all the more shocking for being the second such murder on a railway in three days. A 14-year old had been killed in nearby Farnham very near an existing rail line.Like the murder in Farnham, the Orford Mountain Railway murder leaves the nearby communities in a state of shock and terror. The killing is puzzling in the extreme and while the police investigation eventually leads to an arrest, it soon becomes clear that the two suspects, while possibly guilty of other crimes, are definitely not the murderers. Fast forward a century to the moment the archivist of a local historical society comes across an unusual document. It is the diary of a teenage girl who chronicled the few weeks she spent with detested relatives near Melbourne Township in August 1905. More by accident than design, she provides clues that help the narrator investigate and solve the century-old case of the murder on the Orford Mountain Railway.

When Ishmael Reed wrote The Terrible Twos about the American infantile need for instant gratification, he could not have realized that in June 2020, journalist Nicole Wallace would be referring to a president as a "e;toddler."e; Reed had parodied other genres, the gothic novel, the detective novel, the western, and the neo-slave narrative, a term that he coined in 1984, and which began a big academic payroll as it was included in syllabi nation-wide. From his first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers, Afro-Futurist before the critical term existed, Ishmael Reed has reshaped traditional forms and extended them. As a Jazz pianist, who has performed in clubs and even in a palace in Italy, he compares it to taking cliche chords and re-harmonizing them. The Terrible Fours follows The Terrible Twos (1982) and The Terrible Threes (1989). It is part science fiction, part Washington Novel (Think Drew Pearson's novel, The Senator, films Seven Days In May and The Manchurian Candidate) and part Christmas Novel. Some characters have been dropped and some of the principals are back. St. Nicholas is here, but his sidekick Black Peter is missing. Dean Clift, the president who was removed from office, still resides in a Maryland sanatorium. Televangelist Clement Jones still runs the White House. "e;The Rapture"e; that Jones and the figurehead president Jesse Hatch promised hasn't arrived. The citizens of the planet Dido await an invasion from earth and their planet, an alien in the body of a deceased television producer, works inside the government and attempts to disrupt the invasion. Termite Control, a follower of Odin and a necrophiliac who was dismissed as a political threat in The Terrible Threes, is gaining in the polls, and more and more and more. Reviewing The Terrible Twos, the late John Leonard wrote in The New York Times: "e;Mr. Reed is as close as we are likely to get to a Garcia Marquez, elaborating his own mythology even as he trashes ours."e;

Michaela (Mickie) BEdard works at the Stevens, BEdard Investment Bank, a bank founded by her great grandfather. She is working on an Initial Public Offering for a technology company. Walking home one evening she suffers a severe asthma attack and the investigation leads Gilles to New York and to a network of shady characters operating in New York and in Montreal who are trying to steal the deal from Mickie. The investigation is further complicated by three more murders. King brilliantly combines the best elements of a gritty police procedural in a novel full of twists and unexpected turns. Annie's clever insights are critical in solving the crimes. In the second Annie Linton, Gilles Bellechasse mystery novel, recovering bookseller Montrealer Richard King once again reveals his keen sense of metropolitan life in Montreal and New York City.

This haunting novel, which unfolds across three timelines set in as many decades, takes the reader on a dark journey through the minds of three women whose pasts, presents and futures are decided by a single encounter on a scorching summer afternoon.

It's a long way from a basement apartment in a Montreal suburb to a new life on a fictional planet, but that's the destination our unnamed narrator has set his sights on, bringing readers with him on an off-beat and often hilarious journey.

For Sadia Messaili, the suicide of her son, who emigrated to Canada with his family at the age of 12, is the starting point in this moving and challenging quest for truth about our failing mental-health system, justice, and above all better ways to rekindle hope for people suffering mental illness and for their families.

Contracting surrogate mothers is no longer marginal. Nor is it secret. Surrogacy is growing rapidly even though no informed debate on the social impacts of its normalization has been conducted. It is even regarded as socially progressive, while those who question it are considered to be opposed to progress. The "e;surrogacy process"e;-commissioning a woman to bear and give birth to a child and then surrender it-is vitiated by its contractual nature, be it in its so-called altruistic form (i.e., no exchange of money) or the straight-forward commercial form. It is an attack on the human dignity and equal gender rights of surrogate mothers, but also a denial of the rights of the contracted child to come, who is so often forgotten in the "e;process."e; Current inconsistent or contradictory legislation has led to a fait accompli approach to the question. It's being done, so let's just regulate it, say its defenders. Other countries that have followed that logic have seen an increase in both demand for surrogates and recourse to shrewd international brokers. In many cases, international simply means the surrogate mother is from a poor country with lax legislation, while the commissioning parents are from rich countries. By examining the "e;surrogacy process"e; and all its implications, Maria De Koninck reaches the conclusion that the best way forward is an international ban on surrogacy.

A surprise return home triggers a chain of events, their strands weaving together a sinister web of dreams and reality, lies and truth, secrets and spells. Jean-Michel Fortier's chilling second novel features a cast of memorable characters, including Renee, who never dreams (or does she?), and the oft-widowed Bella, who signs her personal ads "Come, and be prepared to stay forever." Following in the tradition of Fortier's absurdist first novel, The Unknown Huntsman, this is a dark and offbeat tale about lost love, lost dreams, and one lost limb.

A story about love, art, and the 2008 financial crisis. Towards the end of the 18th century, twenty-four traders would meet under a tree to buy and sell shares. The tree was located at 68 Wall Street, so called because of a wall that used to mark the northern limits of the colony of New Amsterdam, on the Island of Manhattan.On May 17, 1792, the twenty-four brokers signed, beneath the tree, the Buttonwood Agreement. This marked the foundation of the New York Stock Exchange, and the birth of Wall Street.Today, the tree on Wall Street has long since fallen, and the twenty-four traders' transactions have become complex to the point of being almost intangible and immaterial. Finance has become an abstraction; it pervades every sphere of our lives, including contemporary art. Especially contemporary art. This love story, based on documentary research, follows a struggling artist and an opportunistic hedge fund manager. As Lehman Brothers falls and two worlds collide, we explore the darkest corners of the contemporary art scene, the global economy, and two broken hearts.

Former bookseller Richard King has created two memorable characters in his mystery novel, A Stab at Life. Annie Linton, RN, is a nurse in the Emergency Department of the Gursky Memorial Hospital in Montreal and Gilles Bellechasse is a detective in the Major Crimes Division of the Montreal Police Force. Gilles is in charge of investigating a series of murders that have occurred in a park and the area surrounding the Gursky Memorial located in the Cote-des-Neiges area of the city. Suspects include members of a vigilante group devoted to getting drug dealers out of the park, a jealous husband, a mysterious woman of whom nude drawings turn up in one of the murder victim's bedroom, and competing drug dealers. Annie's excellent diagnostic skill plays a critical role in solving the crime. King's mysteries are reminiscent of the originators of the mystery genre such as Agatha Christie and Rex Stout. A Stab at Life will delight fans of murder mysteries and have them waiting impatiently for the next novel in the series.

Diagnosed with incurable cancer in 2009 with a maximum six-year life expectancy, the author chronicles her journey through traditional and alternative treatments to complete remission. Without rejecting traditional treatment (i.e., chemo or radio therapies), she refused to be an object to be treated by others. Though initially terrified, she was able to move on, insisting on knowing what was going on and why, which required research, adventure (trips to other countries), sadness, humour, serenity, and some very surprising "e;alternatives,"e; including self-hypnosis, determining the emotional causes of her lymphoma, working with a medium, and the essential need for laughter and hope. Her roadmap could be described as interactive, since newly-diagnosed cancer patients overwhelmed by their situation can adapt her approach to their lives.