Born during the Great Depression, Jean-Claude Morel is an Everyman, a Montreal construction worker whose hands have helped build the city he lives in. He has dug out its metro tunnels, shaped islands in the Saint-Laurent river, and built the expressways that wind through the city’s core. But progress has come at a cost. Neighbourhoods are razed, streets cleared off the map, and the Morel family is expropriated. Bristling with life, Morel unearths a story of Montreal long buried beneath yea...

A Tristram Shandy–esque novella about failing memory and failed writing, from one of French Canada’s most exciting new voices.A young, floundering author meets Robert ‘Baloney’ Lacerte, an older, marginal poet who seems to own nothing beyond his unwavering certainty. Over the course of several evenings, Lacerte recounts his unrelenting quest for poetry, which has taken him from Quebec’s Boreal forests to South America to East Montreal, where he seems poise...