A mesmerizing and moving first collection, Model Disciple gives us a poetry of two minds. Confounded by Japanese-Canadian legacies too painful to fully embrace, Michael Prior’s split speakers struggle to understand themselves as they submit to their reinvention: “I am all that is wrong with the Old World, / and half of what troubles the New.” …

“I was only born into the world,” begins one of Vincent Colistro’s poems, “didn’t invade it, didn’t ransom it for a nicer one.” Late Victorians, Colistro’s debut, is a beguilingly irreverent investigation of the life he was “born into.” Hyper-fluent, riding wave after wave of copious invention, Colistro builds his weirdness from …

A visceral tale of obsession and creativity, unrequited passions and the power of music. A love story in which art is a foil to companionship, and the intellect an interlocutor of the heart.
In the utterly unique All that Sang, the second fiction by Lambda Literary Award-finalist Lydia Perović, a Toronto opera critic on assignment in Paris falls …

Winner, 2015 Archambault Prize

The year is 1996, and small-town life for 14-year-old Catherine is made up of punk rock, skaters, shoplifting, drugs, and the ghost of Kurt Cobain. Her parents are too busy divorcing to pay her headful of unspent angst much attention. But after she tries a PCP variant called mesc for the first time, her budding rebelli …

Winner, 2011 Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction
Longlisted for the 2013 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
Longlisted for CBC Canada Reads 2016

Swiftly paced, poignantly moving, and beautifully imagined, Niko is the powerful epic story of what it takes to survive after war, of what to hold dear and what to leave behind in a world that won’t …

Teenagers accidentally discover the body of a university student at the bottom of the abandoned Wellington Tunnel. When the apparent suicide turns out to be a murder, Lieutenant Detective Toni Damiano, guilt-ridden from her last case, finds herself investigating a chilling trail of lies and deceit, daring love and betrayal. Taylor Sanderson is the …

Installations, David Solway’s 14th book of poetry, is haunted with transformation, Few poets possess as commanding a gift for metaphor or can use it to masterfully conjure the ever-changing landscape of the natural world. Like the jerry-rigged farmer’s contraption that stands in for “eclectic grandeur and jumbled eloquence,” this collection …

Short story writer, novelist and essayist Josip Novakovich returns with his first collection of stories since being named a finalist for the prestigious 2013 Man Booker International prize. In Ex-Yu, he explores the major themes of war and exile, of religiosity and existentialism, that have defined his fiction and earned him a place among the panth …

A Ty Davis Mystery.

A bloody battle between rival motorcycle gangs leads television reporter Ty Davis into yet another dangerous encounter with a big-city’s underworld. His on the scene account of the violence, for CKCF Television’s “Flash News,” draws Davis and his colleagues into a complex web of drug-smuggling and murder. Turf wars pit lo …

In poetry that strikes a delicate balance between candour and lament., Mockingbird tracks the aftershocks of a failed marriage through a variety of self-portraits. Derek Webster’s speakers itemize their regrets and fears while keeping sentimentality in check and the result is a first book of exceptional emotional power. Indeed, the distinctive an …

"It's been a long time now, nearly two years since we met at that party." "Yeah," Tessie said bitterly, "and nearly five years since I was a clever little girl who thought she'd found a way to make a hundred dollars. There was only going to be one time. I needed the dough. Two months later I didn't have an excuse any more and I was still doing it. …

Swing in the House paints an utterly contemporary portrait of Canadian families in their most private moments. Anand pulls back the curtains to reveal the unspoken complexities within the modern home, from sibling rivalries to fracturing marriages, casual racism to damaged egos, hidden homosexuality to mental illness. Each of these stories offers a …

St. Kilda is a barren, rocky archipelago 60 km off the west coast of Scotland. In 1930, harsh conditions led the islands’ remaining 36 inhabitants to relocate to the mainland. Left behind were seabirds and a population of feral sheep. In Leaving the Island, her first poetry collection, Talya Rubin enters the isolated lives of those last Kildarean …

A bold and explicit debut novel by one of the most visceral new voices in gay fiction. Breathing Lessons is the story of Henry Moss, a homosexual everyman whose life knows none of the limitations or abuses his predecessors experienced. When a teenaged Henry came out to his mother, she worried only that he’d be lonely. At the time, he thought her …

A novel about Montreal during the not-so-halcyon era of a couple of decades ago when gangs and girls made rum-running and slot machines big business.
from the 1950 edition

Ronald J. Cooke’s second novel, The Mayor of Côte St. Paulis the tale of a struggling writer living in Depression-era Montreal. Winnipegger Dave Manley arrived in the city thi …

A View from the Porch is an illuminating collection of 22 essays about the points where design touches life and the big and small things that make us appreciate, or become disconnected from, our homes and neighbourhoods.

Drawing on his experiences as an architect, planner, world traveller, and educator, Friedman delves into issues such as the North …

Beginning with the arrival of the Campbell clan in Canada in 1827— “pale Scot farmers fording the river, / seated backwards in refusal”—Laws & Locks tracks the history of one family’s struggle with depression, madness and mental illness. Chad Campbell’s first book of poetry is a brilliant investigation, at once dazzling and unflinching, …

The Veiled Sun: From Auschwitz to New Beginnings by Paul Schaffer and Translated from the French by Vivian Felsen with a Foreword by Serge Klarsfeld and an Introduction by Simone Veil.

The Veiled Sun is a Holocaust memoir written in a highly literate style. Paul Schaffer spent his teenage years on the run from the Nazis in Austria, Belgium and Franc …

The area now called Little Burgundy was the birthplace of jazz in Montreal. Explore the textures of Montreal’s jazz era through an array of rare jazz artifacts, including swizzle sticks and menus from renowned Montreal nightclubs, flapper dresses of the 1920s, porter uniforms, old LP vinyl records, cocktail shakers, and sheet music. Each object t …

Jean-Claude Germain’s second volume of Montreal memoirs chronicles his coming of age: his draconian Jesuit education on the fringes of the city’s Red Light District, followed by his liberating discovery of the city’s fevered bohemian community in the dying days of the Duplessis regime and Quebec’s “grande noirceur.” Here, on the cusp be …

Winner of the 2001 Canadian Jewish Book Awards: Izzy and Betty Kirshenbaum Foundation Prize for Yiddish translation, Montreal of Yesterday was originally published in Yiddish in 1947. It had earlier appeared in installments in the pages of the Keneder Adler - the Canadian Eagle - Montreal's legendary Yiddish-language newspaper. For the first time, …

Radio Weather confronts the changeableness of life—how existence can switch gears with the speed of announced-for snow that turns abruptly to rain. Shoshanna Wingate’s first book runs the gauntlet of her various roles—mother, wife, daughter—in taut, unsentimental, immaculately constructed poems that explore the tension between personal impe …

If Frederick Scott is remembered at all today, it is as minor Victorian poet or as the father of his illustrious son F.R. Scott. However, Frederick Scott was almost 55 years old and the pastor of St. Matthews Anglican Church in Quebec City when he volunteered to go overseas to serve as senior chaplain with the 1st Canadian Infantry Division during …

Demonic to Divine: The Double Life of Shulamis Yelin is a weaving of the Montreal writer’s stories and selected diary excerpts and family photographs revealing a far-reaching creative personality who is haunted from the age of ten by the “moods taking over”.

This book poignantly illuminates the dramatic duality of a public and private literar …

By following the trail of 50 trees, Bronwyn Chester presents a new perspective on the island of Montreal and offers a sense of belonging to an ancient forest, in its modern form. She goes beyond the traits defining each tree and interprets the tree's story. Each story is complemented with an illustration by Jean-Luc Trudel of the tree being discuss …

The Scarborourgh takes place over three days in 1992: Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday—the weekend 15-year-old Kristin French was abducted and murdered by Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. In poems both opulent and stricken, ravishing and unflinching, Michael Lista—nine, at the time—revisits those dates, haunted by the horrifying f …

Taking its title from a story in the collection, this anthology brings together the best prose writing in Quebec—all short pieces—from the winners and finalists of the last three years of the Quebec Writing Competition.

Montreal’s CBC Radio and the Quebec Writers’ Federation created the competition in 1999 which resulted in four previous ant …

The Montreal Police Association Museum, the Bank of Montreal Museum, the Printing Museum of Quebec, Just for Laughs Museum. Never heard of them? Neither have most Montrealers or visitors to Montreal. The city has dozens of "little" museums-undiscovered gems to discover.

Montreal's Other Museums is an illustrated user-friendly pocket guide to an intr …

Like the “page turned down to make another / page,” Dog Ear explores the marks we leave on a world whose social and political markers are constantly shifting. In his fourth book of poems—and most powerful work to date—Jim Johnstone establishes himself as an exquisite observer of decay, both physical and spiritual. This is a universe where m …

Satisfying Clicking Sound is a book that’s never afraid to make a show of itself. In his third collection, Jason Guriel gives us a quick-thinking colloquial style that segues deftly from deadpan wit to deep emotion. Like the hard-to-master knuckleball he celebrates as “less spun / than blown / out onto the air, / its course unknown,” Guriel� …

Set in Montreal, New Tab spans a year in the life of a twenty-six year old videogame designer as he attempts to reset his life, in the process chronicling with humor disillusion, boredom, self-destruction, Facebook chats, Concordia University, bilingualism, good parties, bad parties, a backyard cinema, social anxiety and running a possibly illegal …

It descends with a challenge upon the censors, and yet this powerful story had to be told, for it is so much a part of a struggling, impetuous generation of youth in Canada. It is sometimes brazen, sometimes explosive, always face to face with gripping reality, shocking as that may be to those who shy away from life’s more lurid facets. - from th …

Wanted: One man of average height, well-muscled but not ironclad, neither overly or underly handsome, with more body hair than a baby's behind but less than a gorilla, hefty penis, charge not too easily discharged, good mind, good sense of humour and humo

In the winter of 1868 a name Montreal society associated with art, good breeding, and culture became fodder for scandal mongers. The Notman name, synonymous with fine photography, was suddenly making headlines featuring the words "abortion" and "suicide." A dozen years earlier, two brothers fled their native Scotland . They were attracted to Montre …

Paul Bley was barely into his twenties when he left Montreal for New York City, yet he had already played with Charlie Parker and subbed for Oscar Peterson at the Alberta Lounge. The piano prodigy had been leading his own bands in Montreal clubs since he was thirteen. Stopping Time is the story of a unique Canadian artist and his odyssey through th …

The women in the stories in Out of Cleveland face their challenges with an uncommon blend of intelligence, scepticism, and hope. Each story shows the entanglement of cause and effect, creating a memorable collection of unique voices.

In "Ninety East" a t

Literary agent Madison Holmes is brutally attacked in her condo and left for dead, days after she sent rejection letters to four would-be authors. Lieutenant-Detective Toni Damiano catches this high profile case to the chagrin of the detectives in her division.Unfazed and confident, Damiano is determined to track down the vicious assailant and clos …

One of the earliest Canadian noir novels, Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street tells the story of Gisele Lepine, beautiful farmer’s daughter who leaves her sleepy faming community for the neon lights of Montreal. In the fast-paced city, dreams quickly turn to nightmares as the young ‘farmette’ finds herself surrounded by drug-dealers, newspapermen …

This story with its shocking expose of social evils, holds a forceful message for both sexes. Its strange mixture of power, tension and torment mark it as a human story that will thrill and grip all readers. Down in the depths of the city, washed by the murky waters of the dock-yards lies Skidrow, a dark den of intrigue and mystery, whose crumbling …

Finally, after 58 years The Body on Mount Royal is back in print, starring hard-drinking private dick, Russell Teed.

From the back cover of the 1953 edition:

Take a brutally beaten body, a lonely spot on Montreal’s famous mountain, and a bu

Véhicule Press launches its Ricochet Series of vintage mysteries with The Crime on Cotes des Neiges—a hardboiled detective novel set in Montreal originally published in 1951. At the centre of this novel, and two others by David Montrose, is the hard-drinking, hard-working private dick, Russell Teed.

First Edition 1951 back cover:

There were two b …

By the author of The Crime on Cotes des Neiges, this is the second title in the Véhicule Press Ricochet series of hard-boiled detective novels set in Montreal. Originally published in 1952, Murder Over Dorval follows the investigations of hard-drinking, seasoned private dick, Russell Teed.

First Edition back cover:

In one hand she held a plane tick …

Plots, intrigue and love against the backdrop of imperial China.

This is a unique novel of old China, the traditional landscape of mountains and rivers without end, and life in an imperial city rife with plots, intrigues, culture, sensuality and wealth.

Li Wen, a landscape painter of the Song Dynasty (960-1279 AD), is on a journey to deliver a messag …

The Love Monster is the tall tale of one woman’s struggle with mid-life issues. The main character, Margaret H. Atwood, has psoriasis, a boring job and a bad attitude. Her cheating husband has left her. And none of her pants fit any more.

Marston takes the reader on a hilarious journey of recovery. Hope comes in the form of a dope-smoking senior c …

Latest hilarious collection from Leacock prize-winner!

There’s only one antidote to our speed-crazed, tech-obsessed, gluten-sensitive, password-plagued, financially-jittery, fitness-phobic, fatness-fearing world—and that’s laughter. He Who Laughs, Lasts takes the hassles and headaches of everyday life and converts them by alchemy into humour.

T …

Birth, death and all the big moments in between. Shortlisted for the 2012 Danuta Gleed Literary Award

These stories about artists, lovers, brothers and strangers acutely probe love and loss, men and women together, and the family ties that bind. A father renews an old artistic rivalry with his dying son; a raucous family gathering ends in tragedy; a …

A gutsy, no-holds-barred, coming-of-age story.

In the Point St. Charles of the author’s childhood people move for one of two reasons: their apartment is on fire, or the rent is due. Starting in 1968, eight-year-old Kathy Dobson shares her early years growing up in Point St. Charles, an industrial slum in Montreal (now in the process of gentrificat …