In June 1940, as Benito Mussolini took Italy into war against the Allied Powers, the Canadian authorities launched a series of raids against Italian-Canadians from coast to coast. Suspected of being a danger to national security, several hundreds of them were arrested and interned without trial. Most of the Italian-Canadian...
Fulvio Caccia, Robert Richard
2015
With this psychological thriller, award-winning author Fulvio Caccia continues a trilogy that began in 2004 with The Gothic Line. Jonathan and Leila are two strangers who meet coincidentally in Paris. Soon, their budding romance leads them to discover that they share more than attraction. A dark episode took place between...
A bored part-time college English instructor who teaches a class called "Humour in Classical Novels" to students who really don't care decides to try his hand at stand-up comedy, which takes him from his very protected academic world into an arena open to attack and persecution by his family, the...
The Countess hides behind caricature to better obtain her ends. But all her moods give her a roundness that sometimes shock, amuse, or at times irritate. A cycle of five plays that have been described as ahead of their time.
Réjean Ducharme, Will Browning
2000
In this novel in verse, a beautiful and naive Columbia Columbus wanders through the world in search of friendship upon the death of her famous father. Despite fantastic adventures, she finds mostly cruelty and indifference, until she makes friends with an ever-growing number of animals, some of whom serve as...
Jean Yves Collette, Raymond Chamberlain
1984
The Death of Andre Breton is fiction which reads like a detective novel. The suspense, unlike in the traditional plot, is offered to us here in an elliptical manner. The criss-crossing of different strata of writing makes this a story about confession, delirium, reality.
Denise Boucher, Myrna Delson-Karan
2011
The original French version of this play, Les Divines, produced in 1996, continues an exploration of feminism started in Les Fées ont soif in its portrait of seven daughters who reunite in a ritual wake for an idealized mother.
Writer Jack Fingon realizes too late that his life of "intuition and attraction" has produced little to value, and nothing to remember. To settle a piece of unfinished business, Fingon devises a plan to fulfil the testamentary wish of French vagabond poet Blaise Cendrars -- to be buried in the...
The Enchanted People is a humanitarian fairytale about a young girl named Wawatay who lives away from her village as an outcast because she is different. All the people in her village have an enchanted power except for her, and so, she is not accepted by them. While living in...
The Foundations of Kindness is a tale of love, politics, murder and assassination in Sixties Chicago told from the vantage point of the mountains of British Columbia in the Seventies. Plus contemporary commentary. Young revolutionaries take on the Chicago Democratic Party machine with disastrous consequences for them and their movement....
France Théoret, Luise von Flotow
2017
This history of oppression and its effects, at the heart of a French-Canadian family in the 1950s and 1960s, depicts a combination of prohibitions and censures. While the father demands the children's slavish obedience and labour, the mother promises some protection from his tyranny--until the family settles into a flea...
It is autumn, 1997 and Kate Thuringer is back in her hometown to help her college-age daughter settle into her new life. A professional photographer, Kate has lived in Western Canada for nearly three decades. Before her marriage, however, she survived a turbulent year in which Québécois terrorists kidnapped a...
Achille Campanile, Francesco Loriggio
1995
Plays included in this collection: The Big Bun, The Inventor of the Horse, and War. Campanile's plays combine the visual slapstick of silent cinema with the zany humour of the Marx Brothers and the nonsensical dialogues of Ionesco; the result is a funniness quite unique in this century, laughter as...
Centered around a young high school teacher, The King of the Sea Monkeys is a novel in two parts. Because the protagonist suffers from a traumatic brain injury, the first part is fragmented, finding its way in the narrative in disorderly pieces. The protagonist's “normal” life disintegrates when he is...
The light of the soul
Neruda, the white raven, the black cat
Pietro Corsi
2015
Beginning with seductive thoughts from Neruda's memorias, and brooding over the legends of the Haida people in British Columbia (the white raven) and Italian superstitions (the black cat), the protagonist transports the reader into the world of Canadian immigration post-WW2. On the one hand, there is the memory never wiped...
In The Lion's Mouth, an Italian-Canadian woman, Bianca, tells the story of her beloved cousin, Marco, whose life is disintegrating along with his city - Venice. Marco is her dark twin, her Italian self. As she tries to make sense of her cousin's breakdown, she describes her story and reflects...
The Magic Dogs of San Vicente is set in the aftermath of the war in El Salvador (1980-1992), a war in which the two Flores brothers were arrested and savagely tortured, but a war that they ultimately survived. On a heat-soaked morning in El Salvador's wild countryside, the Flores brothers...
From Black Hand criminals to stand-up cops, from innocent victims and ordinary people to schemers and dreamers: a novel that chronicles one hundred years in the lives and relationships of those who have lived in New York City's Little Italy. A multi-generational, multi-dimensional tale that digs deep into the minds...
The Midwife of Torment & Other Stories is a collection of sudden fiction that compresses its narrative to deliver a variety of stories that alternate the flavour of a philosophical reflection with the whimsical enchantment of a fable with a twist. These stories also often dwell on the strange--and the...
After an old man with a dark past smashes the guitar of private investigator Eliot Conte's adopted child Angel, the man is mysteriously killed. The violence-prone Conte becomes the chief suspect. Angel, a gifted hacker, digs into the past of the old man only to discover a notorious cold case,...
In post WWII Italy, Passero, the son of a winemaker killed by the Nazis, commits an impetuous act. He kidnaps a young orphaned girl and offers her up in exchange for his own freedom. His actions create a lifelong connection with her culminating in an adulterous affair in Toronto in...
A brooding fugitive hides out in a crumbling hotel that was once filled with celebrities enjoying the successes of postwar America. He is a racist with a criminal past, an anti-hero who reflects on the ruins of the South and simultaneously on the life of a German performance artist called...
Nino Famà, Damiano Pietropaolo
2021
This is the story of a struggle between love for God and love of a woman. The reader is immersed in the whirlwind of passions, upheavals and feelings of guilt that overwhelm Stefano, the novel's protagonist. What happens when a dream becomes a nightmare? Stefano is put to the...
Set during America's 1960s New Left movement, The Opposition tells the story of twenty-something young men and women linked by a fierce desire to change the world who become involved in the civil rights and anti-war movements, when under the pressure of Vietnam, and America, unraveling, their web of passion...
This book of broken verses, broken thoughts, about broken feelings. This, a notebook without a beginning, without an end, only a flowing towards being, a growing; contradictions and explanations.
To fill gaping holes in their lives, the protagonists in The Quantum Theory of Love and Madness embark on bizarre quests that ultimately lead them astray. Whether a child savant who sings the lyrics to hundreds of songs (and never talks), a woman who has to decide whether to turn...
Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska, Luise von Flotow
1990
Ouellette-Michalska's feminism is subtle. She understands that repression imprisons men as well as women ... The Sandwoman is dense and opaque, very like the world it portrays. But although the mirror Ouellette-Michalska holds up is clouded, it does provide a fascinating reflection.
A flash fiction novel, The Sea-Wave details the aftermath of the kidnapping by an elderly and emotionally damaged man of a severely disabled, wheelchair-bound, unusually bright, depressive 12-year-old girl incapable of speech. The novel consists of the girl's entries in her diary-like memorandum book, entries which relate her own, surprising...
A novel about passions -- a passion for sex, a passion for America, and a passion for movie-making. Sarah Fielding wants to turn the great Canadian novel into a ‘quality' movie, but the sex-mad producer, the deluded Hollywood star, and the ‘authentic' young actor have their own thoughts about how...
The Shade Tree is a searing exploration of racial injustice set against the backdrop of some of America's most turbulent historical events. The lives of two white sisters and a black midwife are inextricably linked through a series of haunting tragedies, and the characters must make life-changing decisions about where...