Shortlisted for the 2022 Amazon Canada First Novel AwardLonglisted for the 2021 Giller PrizeShortlisted for the 2021 BMO Winterset AwardShortlisted for the 2021 Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for FictionShortlisted for the 2021 Concordia University First Book PrizeShortlisted for the 2022 ReLit Award for FictionA remarkable debut about intergenerational female relationships and resistance found in the unlikeliest of places...

Inspired by Erik Satie's work of the same name, Sports and Pastimes is the latest novel by acclaimed Montreal playwright and author Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard.Translated by Aimee Wall (whose translation of Vickie Gendreau's Testament for BookThug in 2016 drew critical reviews), this fast-paced story follows the daily life, at once empty and overloaded, of a group of friends who spend all their energy trying to distract themselves with huge hits of endorphins, art ...

An imperfect victim becomes the accused in acclaimed Québécoise writer Emmanuelle Pierrot's clear-eyed, precise examination of what drives people to cruelty while still believing they are on the side of good.Eighteen-year-old Sacha and her best friend Tom leave Montreal and hitchhike all the way to Dawson City, Yukon. It is there, where the Klondike and Yukon rivers meet, that they find the community of folk-punks, anarchists, and vagabonds they've...

Finalist for the 2025 Cole Foundation Prize for TranslationFinalist for the 2024 Governor General's Literary Award for TranslationHaving followed the brilliant virologist Régnier from Montreal to Marseille many years ago, Sadie now works as a researcher in a lab, spending most of her time among microscopic creatures who teach her about life as a parasite. By day, she pushes the limits of her understanding alongside Régnier,...

On June 6, 2012, Vickie Gendreau was diagnosed with a brain tumour. In between treatments, between hospital stays and her "room of her own," she wrote Testament, an autofictional novel in which she imagines her death and at the same time, bequeaths to her friends and family both the fragmented story of her last year and the stories of the loved ones who keep her memory alive, in language as raw and flamboyant as she was.In the teasing and passionate voice of a twenty-three-...

At the book fair in Rimouski, a woman picked up my first book to read the back cover. She put it back down, avoiding my eyes. It's heavy, cancer and death and all that. I wish books were more interactive. Like video game controllers. They could vibrate at the end of each chapter. But that's not how life works. I wonder what death is like. Do you vibrate? Do the words GAME OVER appear?In 2012, Vickie Gendreau was diagnosed with a brain tumour and wrote a book narrating her ...

Winter blankets Montreal, while a bookseller and her lover dream of Prague. As the narrator’s open marriage becomes the subject of a novel, reality blurs with fiction, and she tries to reconcile the need to create with the desire for love and sex. Written in stark, spare prose, Prague is an introspective and intimate account of the making of a novel from life. REVIEWS “a maelstrom of situations and emotions … heartbreaking.” (James Fisher, The Miramichi Reader) EXERPT "Our story was fallin...

Shortlisted for the 2022 Amazon Canada First Novel AwardLonglisted for the 2021 Giller PrizeShortlisted for the 2021 BMO Winterset AwardShortlisted for the 2021 Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for FictionShortlisted for the 2021 Concordia University First Book PrizeShortlisted for the 2022 ReLit Award for FictionA remarkable debut about intergenerational female relationships and resistance found in the unlikeliest of places...

Winter blankets Montreal, while a bookseller and her lover dream of Prague. As the narrator’s open marriage becomes the subject of a novel, reality blurs with fiction, and she tries to reconcile the need to create with the desire for love and sex. Written in stark, spare prose, Prague is an introspective and intimate account of the making of a novel from life.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZEA lyrical novel set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution that follows a father’s quest to reunite his family before his precocious daughter’s momentous birthday, which Garth Greenwell calls “one of the most beautiful debuts I’ve read in years.”How many times in life can we start over without losing ourselves?In the summer of 1986 in a small Chinese village, ten-y...

The acclaimed winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award, by the author of The Country LifeChronically confused, terminally middle class, hopelessly romantic, Agnes Day lives with her two best friends in the London suburbs and works at an obscure trade magazine. Life and love seem to go on without her. But she gives a convincing performance that everything is alright--that is, until she learns that her roommates and her boyfriend are keeping secrets from he...

Finalist for the 2022 Trillium Book AwardThe intertwined story of a cougar and a man that portrays the strength, vulnerability, and consciousness of two top predators. Not since Life of Pi have we encountered such transcendence or walked so fully in the footsteps of a big cat.The “Old Woman” lives in the wild, searching for food, raising her cubs, and avoiding the two-legged creatures who come into her territory. But she is more th...