Published at 12:01 am. Updated at 7:00 a.m.
What I know about you, Eric Chacour
Éric Chacour's manuscript was so complete that Alto once believed that an author from the house wanted to put the editorial process to the test. A dazzling story of love that will force a doctor who had previously resigned himself to his fate to leave his homeland of Egypt. What I know about you is overwhelming, thanks to this language that knows how to translate these moments with the elegance of a goldsmith Life unfolds all its colors. But if this first novel is so powerful, it's because there's nothing more moving than seeing someone finally come into their own, no matter what the consequences.
What I know about you
Old
296 pages
Hotline, Dimitri Nasrallah
“The only language spoken in this work is that of the heart,” wrote columnist Rima Elkouri about Dimitri Nasrallah’s fourth novel, translated by Daniel Grenier. The Montrealer of Lebanese origin offers one of his most endearing mother figures to a Quebec literature already populated by them: Muna, a French teacher who had every reason to believe she could thrive in her native Quebec. “Adoption.” A book that would just be sad, because 1986 looks a little too much like 2023 if the son didn't give his own mother all his affection.
Hotline
The people
376 pages
Fortresses and other places of refuge, Rafaële Germain
Is memory really just another form of fiction? This enormous question was explored by Rafaële Germain in An Infinite Present (2016) and revisited in this story of three memoirs, a generous and unvarnished portrait of his mother, the late and flamboyant press secretary Francine Chaloult, who suffers from Alzheimer's disease. The former queen of chick lit also reveals a lot herself, continuing one of the most astonishing reinventions of Quebec literature of the last 20 years. A writer of economical poetry, she knows how to package an entire world of inner devastation in formulas of merciless grace.
Fortresses and other places of refuge
Quebec, America
128 pages
Fitness, Mikella Nicol
The truism has rarely been truer this year than between the pages of Mise en format: There is nothing more universal than the intimate. By examining her own obsessive fitness practice, Mikella Nicol puts in the dock a society that taught her from a very early age, through popular culture or through the voices of those close to her, that a woman should not only be in control of her body , but that she wasn't safe anywhere. She is guided by her disturbing intuition that “violence and beauty both define femininity,” without the reality around her contradicting her.
formatting
The Horse of August
160 pages
Full of ordinariness, Étienne Tremblay
Mathieu thinks his dreams are reality, and that's a good thing, because reality can be very, very boring when you're just out of high school and have to show up at a suburban gas station every night. This coming-of-age novel criticizes the absurdity of the world of work, a mass grave of hopes that adults obey with too little resistance, and uses humor to illuminate the arrogance of a soft-hearted person who considers himself exceptional. and remind us that when adolescents lack perspective, they view the sacrifices and compromises of their elders with an undeniable insight.
Usually full
Red herbs
320 pages
Galumpf, Marie Hélène Poitras
In the final chapter of this collection of short stories, Marie Hélène Poitras describes the dizzying power of her passion for literature and horses by memorializing an animal that has galloped into another dimension. It thus illuminates his entire work, which is rooted in the melancholy of loss. Loss of openness. Loss of a loved one. Loss of a place where it will have been nice to be alive for an eternity or the time of a perfect song. More than 20 years after her first book, the author is more than ever a master of meaningful atmospheres, a virtuoso who weighs each of their effects.
Galumpf
Old
192 pages
Granby in the simple past, Akim Gagnon
After the fireworks (misfire?) of excess and toilet scenes in “A Cigar on the Edge of the Lips,” Akim Gagnon devotes himself to his tender side in this prequel to his first novel. Granby, with a simple past, is the portrait of a youth torn between his father's bouts of euphoria and the gray cloud that still haunts the family's ruined home, otherwise the horizon would have been blocked. The most disarming of all odes to the father, precisely because the son does not hide his mistakes at all.
Granby in the simple past
The wick
416 pages
The version that no one cares about, Emmanuelle Pierrot
“Now I will speak, and one day I will die, but in the meantime I won't hold my bitch,” declares Sacha – and she's not lying – in the prologue to The Version That Nobody Cares, a novel about misadventures and disillusionment, set in a Yukon where even the marginalized turn out to be just as stupid as the rest. Across more than 350 pages, Emmanuelle Pierrot maintains a punch worthy of a compact hardcore punk song. Books that spread such enthusiastic rumors rarely live up to the hype.
The version that no one cares about
The Quarter
368 pages
Lourdes, Catherine Lemieux
In a time when publicly displaying your virtue is more important than actually working to change the world, and when you are rewarded for saying the right thing even when you have done the wrong thing , Catherine Lemieux speaks out against a murderous satirical microcosm of the university. This novel is a twisted fable that takes place around a conference of the Laboratoire du Néo-Moi Féminisant. His opaque black humor is perhaps just a sharp form of clarity, dismembering a medium in which self-expression triumphs over all. The funniest or most tragic book of the year, depending on your point of view.
Lourdes
Boreal
368 pages
Every wound is a promise, Simon Brousseau
Faced with the relentless announcement of the diagnosis of his father, who died 14 months later of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Simon Brousseau had to put fiction aside. In evocative language, devoid of all artificiality because all adornment seems useless in the face of death, a son, himself a parent, wonders what use it can be to exist when we know that eventually everything will change . On the side of suffering and grief. He finds comfort in the wisdom of the Stoics, in his daughter's smile, and in his fond memories of the time he spent with the man in his life.
Every wound is a promise
heliotrope
210 pages