Other Maps

Author: Rebecca Morris
Date: September 2024
LITERARY FICTION

AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER
Anna Leverett is home for her dad's retirement party and counting the days until she can leave. She is sick of being reminded that her life has consisted of wrong turns and dead ends. Then a meeting with her ex-best friend Helen raises unexpected questions about her past: What really happened at that New Year's party back in high school? How true were all those ugly rumours? With Helen at her side, Anna can finally reckon with her past and chart a course towards a better future.

Moving through rape culture, beauty myths, and the perils women face in a society that stigmatizes them just for being female, Other Maps traces a path to courage, solidarity and hope.

Line Breaks: A Writing Life

Author: George Galt
Date: August 2024
LITERARY MEMOIR

AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER
Line Breaks: A Writing Life tells the story of George Galt’s deeply religious childhood, the turmoil of his escape from the ultra-conservative values of his family, and his ultimate success in gaining a toehold in the realm of books and writing as poet, non-fiction writer, and editor. 

A settler clan with nineteenth-century Canadian roots, the Galts had produced judges, businessmen, and a confederation-era cabinet minister. In Scotland, the family’s patriarch had been an improvident author of some distinction, the novelist John Galt, who settled briefly in Canada in the 1820s. George’s family established itself in Winnipeg and moved to Montreal when his father took up a job with the Sun Life Assurance Company, of which he was CEO when the company moved its head office out of Quebec in 1978.

Cosmic Wonder: Our Place in the Epic Story of the Universe

Author: Nathan Hellner-Mestelman
Date: April 2024
NON-FICTION / YOUNG ADULT / SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

AVAILABLE NOW
Embark on a humorous and detailed cosmic journey with science writer Nathan Hellner-Mestelman in Cosmic Wonder: Our Place in the Epic Story of the Universe. From the absurd speeds of our tiny planet to the depths of the universe, this guide offers a funny, deep, and insightful exploration.

Warning: Prepare for an existential crisis as you ponder our cosmic origins, connections—and the riveting cascade of destruction that binds us to the cosmos. Buckle up for a brain-tingling rollercoaster ride to the edge of the universe and back.

Seeking Asylum: Building a Shareable World

Author: Toula Drimonis
Date: March 2024
NON-FICTION / POLITICS

Human migration and the right to seek asylum from harm have been constants throughout the history of human existence. But only recently has Canada been forced to confront a global displacement crisis that much of the rest of the planet has long been dealing with.

Seeking Asylum is a plea for empathy. A way of rethinking and reframing the conversation to emphasize both our common humanity and our moral and legal obligations to one another.

The author of the bestselling essay, We, the Others: Allophones, Immigrants, and Belonging in Canada (LLP 2022), Toula Drimonis traces the history of sanctuary, examines myths about refugees and migrants, and interviews with migration experts, immigration lawyers, refugees, and people working on the ground to provide a nuanced look at the asylum process. One that centres people.

Here Is Still Here

Author: Sivan Slapak
Date: March 2024
LITERARY FICTION

Isabel, raised in a family of post-war Jewish immigrants in Canada, embarks on a journey to find love, purpose and home, navigating between Montreal and Jerusalem. In Here Is Still Here, Sivan Slapak explores human connection and identity with compassion and wit, reminding us that no matter how far you go, you remain yourself.

The Storm of Progress: Climate Change, AI, and the Roots of Our Dangerous Ethical Myopia

Author: Wade Rowland
Date: January 2024
AN LLP SINGLES ESSAY

NOW AVAILABLE
In a time of existential threats from climate change, computer-based superintelligences, AI-accelerated nuclear and biological warfare and more, we can no longer avoid some profound questions about what’s going on. We need to ask: what kind of 'progress' leads to the destruction of humanity’s basic habitat, even its basic identity?

How Did I Get Here? A Writer's Education

Author: David Homel
Date: September 2023
MEMOIR

Award-winning author David Homel mixes memoir and fiction, truth and make-believe in these mediations on his youth in Chicago, his education, and the influences that led to his career as a writer.

A Ramshackle Home

Author: Felicia Mihali
Date: September 2023
FICTION

After her marriage breaks up, a woman returns with her young son to the ramshackle house in the countryside where her parents once lived. Her story unfolds against the backdrop of a country laid waste by a half century of Communist rule. She grapples with the desolation of her physical surroundings and seeks solace in the world of her imagination, where her memories are interwoven with tales from ancient mythology.

Scar Tissue: Tracing Motherhood

Author: Sara Danièle Michaud
Date: April 2023
AN LLP SINGLES ESSAY

What makes a mother? More than any other relationship or identity, motherhood is both organic and constructed. Mothers are created by their children, and then simultaneously expanded and abbreviated by maternity as a social category.

In Scar Tissue: Tracing Motherhood, Montreal writer and literary philosopher Sara Danièle Michaud brings her considerable intellectual scope to the impossible intimacy of this most primal human relationship. Intense and intertextual, the book draws as easily from Saint Augustine as from Sheila Heti, weaving a long essay that is both deeply personal and eloquently universal.

Where They Stood: The Evolution of the Black Anglo Community in Montreal

Author: Black Community Resource Centre
Date: March 2023
NON-FICTION / BLACK COMMUNITY_A Singles Title

A collaborative work by young Black writers and the Black Community Resource Centre, Where They Stood examines history beyond racism and slavery to reveal the inspiring story of Montreal's English-speaking Black community.

In this collection, nine writers explore the rich histories of the immigrants, labourers and activists who built the cultural, social and political community that exists to this day. By highlighting Black achievement and perseverance, these essays reimagine what possibilities may lie ahead. Where They Stood is a story of positivity, triumph, and joy.

Dear Humans: A Letter from the Animals

Author: Nisha Coleman
Date: March 2023
RUELLE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE

The Earth is changing fast! Polar Bear's ice is melting. Gazelle's savanna is turning into a desert. Sea Turtle's waters are poisoned. Toucan's rainforest is disappearing. 

How bad is it? Gorilla calls all the animals to a summit. They have to talk. When they realize that humans are behind the destruction, they must act quickly. Should they send them to another planet? Maybe the humans need their help? The animals write a letter to remind humans how they were meant to live on this Earth. And how to turn things around before it's too late.

An Opera in 3 Acts Starring Gino Quilico

Author: Connie Guzzo-McParland
Date: October 2022
BIOGRAPHY

When young Louis Quilico meets upcoming concert pianist Lina Pizzolongo, a personal and musical collaboration begins that sees Louis become one of the most accomplished baritones in the world. Their son, Gino, follows in his father's footsteps to emerge as a globetrotting opera singer. Theirs is a story of love, fame, estrangement, breakdown, and finally triumph.

Connie Guzzo-McParland writes her own aria with this real-life family dynasty that takes us through the world of opera––all its high notes, tragedies and artistry intact.

Also available in French: Un opéra en 3 actes mettant en vedette Gino Quilico

Mukbang

Author: Fanie Demeule
Date: September 2022
LITERARY FICTION

Kim Delorme is uninterested in the world beyond her computer screen, instead living on a diet of video games, early 2000s Internet videos, and fads. It’s not long before she discovers mukbangs, a voyeuristic world where people overeat in front of the camera. Intrigued, she throws herself into the ring to challenge the reigning queen, Misha Faïtas. But a horrifying incident halts her ascension, creating a shock wave that affects everyone in her life.

Mukbang is a grimy, shocking, and darkly funny dive into our relationships with food, self-image, and intimacy. True to its subject matter, Mukbang is sprinkled with QR codes throughout, each leading to an image, reference or video that enhances and adds context to the narrative.

We, the Others

Author: Toula Drimonis
Date: September 2022
NON-FICTION / IMMIGRATION / POLITICS

Ungrateful, opportunistic, moochers, dangerous, incompatible with our values and our way of life…
Every immigrant demographic has heard these descriptors at some point in their migration history. We, the Others  takes a contemporary look at the xenophobia, ethno-nationalism, and fear of the other that leads to discrimination and the belief that immigration is a polluting force.

Rooted in the author’s personal family history as the second-generation daughter of Greek immigrants, and from her research as a journalist and columnist covering politics, policy and social issues in Quebec and Canada, Drimonis courageously tackles this country’s history and practices, divisive legislation like Bill 21, and various nationalist movements that have influenced policy. We, the Others is a poignant look at inter-generational struggles, conflicting loyalties, and the heartfelt questions of belonging.

Can't Help Falling: A Long Road to Motherhood

Author: Tarah Schwartz
Date: April 2022
MEMOIR / ADOPTION

When Tarah Schwartz miscarried for the first time at almost 5 months, it was devastating. Determined to try again, more miscarriages would follow, threatening her stability and her relationships, and changing her profoundly. In this memoir, Tarah puts words to excruciating loss as she recounts her unexpected and deeply inspiring journey to motherhood.

As a long time news reporter, she spent years working in front of a television camera, telling stories that reflected the power of the human spirit to survive. This time she tells her own.

Léa

Author: Ariela Freedman
Date: March 2022
LITERARY FICTION

How do you change the world? Meet Léa, polyglot, labour activist, farbrente feminist. Born to a large Jewish family and raised in a French Catholic town, Léa moves fluidly between languages and cultures. Her search for meaning and her instinct for justice place her at the centre of the great changes of the 20th century. From street fights in Berlin to protests in Montreal, she defies the expectations and limitations of women’s lives, wins historic victories for the union movement, and grapples with her own convictions.

Based on the life of famed activist Léa Roback, this novel brings to life a heroine emboldened by political struggles that resonate to this day.

Firebrands

Author: Marc Ménard
Translation: Peter McCambridge
Date: March 2022
THRILLER

Philippe is a man of routine. He has a job, a wife, two kids, and an uneventful life in the suburbs of Montreal. His days as a student chasing neo-Nazis across Europe feels like a lifetime ago. Until Robert, a ghost from the past, turns up on his doorstep. A dangerous band of white supremacists is on the rise and Robert needs his help.

But what is the real danger––and how far is Philippe prepared to go?

No Crystal Stair

Author: Mairuth Sarsfield
Date: November 2021
LITERARY FICTION / BLACK MONTREAL

First published in 1993, No Crystal Stair is an absorbing story of urban struggle in the 1940s. Raising her three daughters alone, Marion discovers she can only find gainful employment if she passes as white. Set in the Montreal working class neighbourhood of Little Burgundy against the backdrop of an exciting cosmopolitan jazz scene—home of Oscar Peterson, Oliver Jones, and Rockhead's Paradise—and the tense years of World War II, No Crystal Stair is both a tender story of friendship and community as well as an indictment of Canada's "soft" racism.

In 2005, No Crystal Stair was nominated for Canada Reads and was defended by Olympic fencer Sherraine MacKay. It has been out of print for the past several years and this re-edition is an opportunity to bring a pivotal work of fiction back to Canadian readers.

The French translation, En bas de la côte, was published by LLP in 2022.

I Am the Earth the Plants Grow Through

Author: Jack Hannan
Date: September 2021
LITERARY FICTION

A photographer takes pictures of his wife. She watches him look. What do they see and how does that change over the years? I Am the Earth the Plants Grow Through is about what keeps people together––and what can pull them apart. As Tomas and Marie cross the country and each other’s lives, they discover what it means to be fully human. A story of passion, love, aging, and the sadness of loss.

Lunging into the Underbrush: A Life Lived Backward

Author: David Homel
Date: April 2021
LITERARY NON-FICTION / MEMOIR

In 1970, David Homel escaped the American draft by moving to Paris. But a hiking accident in Spain led to a harrowing journey through botched surgeries, opiate addiction, the loneliness of a crippled traveler, and the constant pain that would define his life for years to come. Today, planning to stay in the game as long as possible, he has a few ideas about how to do just that.

By confronting body image issues, performance anxiety, and the challenges of desire, Homel draws an affecting portrait of the battle between Eros and Melancholy. Which one will prevail in this story we call our lives?

SHORTLISTED for the 2021 Miramichi Reader Very Best Book Award
SHORTLISTED for the 2022 J.I. Segal Award for Best Quebec Book on a Jewish Theme

A Cemetery for Bees

Author: Alina Dumitrescu
Translation: Katia Grubisic
Date: April 2021
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FICTION

This autobiographical novel traces a woman's journey from her youth in Socialist Eastern Europe to her transplanted life in Montreal, Canada. She is a precocious, thoughtful child, whose early life in Romania is marked by the scarcities of the time and the political games needed to survive, but she is not unhappy. Placed around her family’s house are hives—the bees discourage the secret police from visiting too often—and the bees provide both a childish diversion and an overarching metaphor for departure and home.

An elegant, candid book, A Cemetery for Bees is an elegy for childhood, a declaration of francophile love, and a complicated look at who we are, who we were, and where we might find ourselves.

FINALIST for the 2021 Governor General's Literary Award for Translation

Kerouac & Presley

Author: André Pronovost
Translation: Fred A. Reed
Date: February 2021
LITERARY MEMOIR / AMERICANA / QUEBEC

Kerouac & Presley takes you on the road, guitar slung over your shoulder. Beginning in the Montreal neighbourhood where a teenage girl was brutally murdered in 1975, the International Year of the Woman, the story travels to an Abbey in Connecticut where a former starlet and Elvis co-star fled Hollywood to become a nun. This is the memoir of a wanderer who sets out to rewrite “the blank and flawless page” that is America. Inspired by the history of Quebec and America, Kerouac & Presley is an American prayer in prose and paragraphs.

Working in the Bathtub: Conversations with the Immortal Dany Laferrière

Author: Adam Leith Gollner
Date: November 2020
NON-FICTION / LITERATURE / QUÉBEC / HAITI

Montreal writer Dany Laferrière became “Immortal” in 2015 when he was inducted into the Académie française, the highest accolade in all French literature. He was the first Quebecer to be so honoured, and only the second Black man.

In these wide-ranging interviews with Adam Leith Gollner, portions of which were originally published in The Paris Review, Laferrière reveals how his life and his writing are inseparable, discussing everything from his breakout debut, How To Make Love To a Negro Without Getting Tired, to the extraordinary success of more recent novels such as The Return and I Am a Japanese Writer.

Brilliant, comedic, and full of insightful advice for writers and readers, these conversations also serve as the definitive introduction to one of our greatest storytellers.

Little Girl Gazelle

Author: Stéphane Martelly
Translation: Katia Grubisic
Date: September 2020
RUELLE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE

A little girl gazelle leaps from page to page, asking hard questions about what is fair and right. She’s sleek and fleet, and the poetic language lifts her up, up, higher and faster as she whirls through the bold eloquence of the book’s illustrations, making colourful tracks, leaving her mark, finding her way, skimming and dancing through an unjust world.

Part fable, part metaphor, Little Girl Gazelle is an extraordinarily beautiful picture book focused on discrimination and equality, presenting parents’ subtle efforts to prepare their black gazelle child for “a world of lions.”

Daughter of Here

Author: Ioana Georgescu
Translation: Katia Grubisic
Date: September 2020
LITERARY FICTION

Daughter of Here is an experiment in memory, desire, and time. As she sifts through her international whirlwind romance with Célestin, her larger-than-life love for her daughter Mo, and her own childhood behind the Iron Curtain, Dolores’s narrative shifts from Williamsburg to Tokyo, to Bucharest before and after the fall, and to Cairo at the first spark of the Arab Spring.

Filmic and thought-provoking, Daughter of Here straddles the political and the personal with ease.

A Woman of Her Time: Memories of My Mother

Author: Louise Dupré
Translation: Liedewy Hawke
Date: March 2020
LITERARY NON-FICTION / MEMOIR

In this memoir, the distinguished feminist author and poet Louise Dupré conjures up the tragedies and joys of her mother’s life--and does so not only in the personal context of the family but as a woman of her time in the dramatically changing backdrop of Quebec before, during, and after the heady days of the Quiet Revolution. A compelling read that will expand your understanding of the complexity of Quebec society over the past century, as well as your appreciation of the great, wise, and compassionate Louise Dupré.

Home Sickness

Author: Chih-Ying Lay
Translation: Darryl Sterk
Date: March 2020
LITERARY FICTION / TAIWAN / LGBTQ

Connecting is not easy, but proximity is unbearable. The characters in these brilliant and intense stories are longing for escape, but they inevitably find themselves homesick.

Chih-Ying Lay, a Taiwanese-Canadian, explores our desperate need for beauty and belonging–-and the cost when what is found is the opposite of both. Lay’s characters are outsiders, whether queer, indigenous, unloved, or lost, and each discovers that home is not the sanctuary it was meant to be. Sometimes, however, they find a place to call their very own, as if to tell the reader: You can, too.

"Good writers create worlds -- great writers, glittering constellations. Chih-Ying Lay's debut collection makes my head spin. Diamond-hard, harrowing, melancholy, bawdy, erudite, his stories stream with blood, sperm, tears, piss, sweat, passion, loss. A medical student lovingly dissects the body of a dear friend who was a political dissident; a twisted sexual triangle develops between an artist, her nine-year-old son, and a day labourer; a young man whose mother is in chemo develops sympathetic symptoms all his own. By turns blunt, cynical, yearning, delicate, wounding, Home Sickness is the work of a true original. As one queer writer to another, I salute an astonishing new talent."
Will Aitken, Antigone Undone

Lightness

Author: Fanie Demeule
Translation: Anita Anand
Date: March 2020
LITERARY FICTION

Told with startling, unapologetic honesty and in a haunting, minimalist style, Lightness is the story of a young woman's profound sense of alienation, beginning with her own physical body and its desires. In this original and moving take on anorexia, we go deep into the mind of the narrator as she carries out her secret, prolonged hunger strike against the constraints of her life.

The original French version of Lightness (Déterrer les os) won the Best First Novel Prize at the Biennale littéraire des Cèdres in 2018 and was adapted for stage at the Centre du Théâtre d'Aujourd'hui in Montreal.

"At only 26, Fanie Demeule's sharp pen has crafted a shocking first novel." 
Châtelaine

BRONZE for the First Fiction Miramichi Reader Very Best Book Award

Who Belongs in Quebec? Identity Politics in a Changing Society

Author: Raquel Fletcher
Date: March 2020
NON-FICTION / QUEBEC POLITICS

Are Quebecers less tolerant than other Canadians? Ongoing debate about secularism and religious symbols has led many observers to ask that very question. Premier François Legault denied that racism or Islamophobia exists in Quebec, even after a gunman opened fire in a Quebec City mosque in 2017, killing six people and wounding 19 others. The Quebec government has now established a religious symbols ban for some public employees. The increasingly diverse new reality is sometimes embraced and sometimes met with hostility from alt-right groups and emboldened anti-immigrant sentiment. One of the biggest questions Quebecers will have to face is: What does this new reality mean for the Quebec identity? And who gets to consider themselves a Quebecer?

The author, a young journalist who moved to Quebec City from Saskatchewan, has some critical questions for the adopted province she loves.

ABC MTL

Author: Jeanne Painchaud & Bruno Ricca
Translation: Katia Grubisic
Date: November 2019
RUELLE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE

A B C D E F G….M is for Montreal spelled out as a playful, poetic tour guide. From A to Z, every letter of the alphabet offers a surprising glimpse into the world’s favourite city.

Shortlisted for the 2018 TD Canadian Children's Literature Prize in the original French version (Les 400 Coups), ABC MTL has now been translated into English by award-winning poet Katia Grubisic.

ABC MTL is Linda Leith Publishing's first title in our new imprint for Books for Young People: ruelle. Lighthearted, whimsical, and adventurous, ruelle takes LLP down a new and exciting path.

The Far Himalaya

Author: Phillip Ernest
Date: September 2019
FICTION

Young and homeless on the streets of Toronto, Benjamin Doheney is sustained by an unusual sources of strength: his devotion to Sanskrit, the ancient literary language of India. Together with Aditi, a student of Sanskrit at the University of Toronto, he dreams of a future with her in India, a land in which she has her own troubled history. Before they can move on, they must extricate her from the clutches of her malevolent PhD supervisor. When a murder on campus threatens to draw the police’s attention to Ben and his friends, events spiral out of control, drawing them all towards a possibly bloody culmination in which the couple’s hopes for a distant future peace may not survive.

The Girl Who Stole Everything

Author: Norman Ravvin
Date: September 2019
LITERARY FICTION

A stolen house on a Polish square. A pop bottle on Vancouver’s east side. Nadia Baltzan knows a few things about theft. The Girl Who Stole Everything is a fresh and telling portrait of the relationship between prewar Polish shtetl life and Jewish lives today. In Poland, a house stands empty on a village square seventy-five years after its owners were killed. In Vancouver, the aftermath of a murder overturns the life of the victim’s niece. In these old and new worlds a mystery lurks, and Norman Ravvin lovingly recovers the past of both.

Claremont

Author: Wiebke von Carolsfeld
Date: September 2019
LITERARY FICTION

How to survive the unthinkable? This is the question nine-year-old Tom has to face after witnessing his parent’s murder-suicide. After the horrific event, Tom refuses to speak. At first, he moves in with his childless Aunt Sonya, but she is ill equipped to deal with the traumatized boy. Before long, Tom is forced to move again, this time to Claremont Street in downtown Toronto, where he shares a run-down house with his mercurial Aunt Rose and his reckless yet endearing Uncle Will. As the seasons change, Tom’s silence becomes a powerful presence, allowing this fractured family to hear one another for the first time— and for Tom to finally find a home. Claremont is a gripping story of one family’s journey through grief and toward healing.

Cologne-based publisher Kiepenheuer & Witsch published the German version of Claremont in 2020:  Das Haus in der Claremont Street.

SHORTLISTED for the 2020 Miramichi Reader Very Best Book Award

Blindshot

Author: Denis Coupal
Date: March 2019
THRILLER

When financier Paul Carignan is hit by a stray bullet and killed in Beaufort, Quebec, the town leaders are reluctant to investigate. Running out of patience, his teenage sons, Jack and Noah, take justice into their own hands, kidnapping the locals they suspect are responsible. Things soon erupt and the boys find themselves besieged in their house with their captives. In the middle is their mother, Catherine, not sure which side to take. For Tom ‘Brooder’ Doran, Beaufort's Deputy Chief of Police, the investigation has just gotten very complicated. One thing’s for sure, this sleepy town is in for a fiery shakeup.

The French version translated by Joanna Gruda was released in 2021: Coup Fatal

GOLD for the First Fiction 2020 Miramichi Reader Very Best Book Award
FINALIST for the 2020 Crime Writers of Canada Best First Crime Novel

A Joy To Be Hidden

Author: Ariela Freedman
Date: March 2019
LITERARY FICTION

Alice Stein, a young graduate student living in a vivid and chaotic late-90s East Village, loses her father and grandmother in a single year. In the process of cleaning out her grandmother's Brooklyn apartment, she begins to unlock a family secret. Accompanied by her precocious downstairs neighbour, a twelve-year-old girl named Persephone, she sets out on a quest to understand her family and herself. In the process, she will discover lost children and buried love affairs, histories she wants to believe and people she can't trust, a village in Hungary and an artist's loft in Harlem.

A coming-of-age story about hidden pasts and the legacy of trauma and displacement, A Joy To Be Hidden is told with humour and insight. We can never quite forget the title quote by D. W. Winnicott: “It is a joy to be hidden, and a disaster not to be found." We soon discover that it applies to everyone.

SHORTLISTED for the 2019 QWF Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction
SHORTLISTED for the J.I. Segal Award for the Best Quebec Book

Butterfly

Author: John Delacourt
Date: March 2019
THRILLER

Lucien and Nataša might have slipped toward love, if her past in Sarajevo hadn’t caught up with her. Nataša finds work modeling for a painter in Toronto, but he is murdered. Nataša disappears that night, running for her life. Her vanishing is connected to the discovery of a video, secretly filmed in a small town in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war. Butterfly is a novel that charts a controlled descent through the dark legacy of war and the underbelly of the global art scene … into a world ruled by a desperate hope for impossible redemption.

SHORTLISTED for the 2020 Miramichi Reader Very Best Book Award

For Want of a Fir Tree: Ukraine Undone

Author: Frédérick Lavoie
Translation: Donald Winkler
Date: September 2018
LITERARY NON-FICTION / UKRAINE

How can a country at peace suddenly be plunged into war? What compels hitherto peaceable citizens to take up arms and kill one another? In For Want of a Fir Tree: Ukraine Undone, Frédérick Lavoie tells Artyom, a four-year-old child he saw lying in his little blue coffin on a January afternoon in 2015, about the sequence of events that led to his death. In doing so, and in travelling the country from one side to the other, talking to people from all walks of life in both camps, Lavoie tells a compelling story of a land drawn into conflict through misadventure, misjudgment, mistrust, and a legacy of ancient historical resentments with a tenacious hold on their populations. It is a cautionary tale whose truths and whose lessons resonate far beyond these specific events, these particular borders.

Taximan

Author: Stanley Péan
Translation: David Homel
Date: September 2018
LITERARY NON-FICTION / HAITI

In the taxi rides you're about to take, you'll be in the company of some classic drivers and their perspicacious and sharp-eyed passenger, the writer and broadcaster Stanley Péan. Veteran translator David Homel, who introduced readers of English to Dany Laferrière with the publication of How to Make Love to a Negro, now brings us the other major voice of Haitian Montreal, Stanley Pean, here in English for the first time.

White Out

Author: Martine Delvaux
Translation: Katia Grubisic
Date: September 2018
LITERARY FICTION

WHITE OUT is at first glance a woman’s invention, over and over again, of the man who chose not to be her father, leaving his young lover pregnant. Yet, arcing from late-1960s Quebec to the present, it is also the story of a young woman, and a generation of young women, caught between Catholicism and free love. Martine Delvaux’s aching take on her own origin story is a book about words lost in a lifetime of storms, about truth and fiction, a book about how something as seemingly commonplace as parentage can undermine everything—confidence, relationships, the body, memory. Through narrative we try to patch our unknowns but narrative, at once foreign and familiar, fails us.

Rebellion

Author: Cristina Carvalho
Date: April 2018
LITERARY FICTION

Rebellion is Portuguese literary celebrity Cristina Carvalho’s international debut. Born a rebel, Lena escapes her provincial existence and heads for Lisbon as a young woman to make a more exciting life for herself. Once there, though, she makes a series of fateful decisions--spending a night in a brothel, embarking on a marriage she lives to regret, longing instead for the blue-eyed man of her dreams.

The Vetala

Author: Phillip Ernest
Date: March 2018
LITERARY FICTION / SANSKRIT VAMPIRE

Nada Marjanovic, professor of Sanskrit at the University of Zagreb, has spent more than twenty years translating an obscure text on the vetala, a parasitic, vampire-like being that possesses the bodies of his victims. When her mentor and collaborator in the Indian city of Pune dies, she finds herself face-to-face with the undead that the text describes, an evil which long ago killed her lover – and set her on the path of an obsessive scholarly revenge. She must rely on her intellect, mythic lore, and even dreams to piece together the mystery of the manuscript.

The vetala’s opposition grows increasingly violent as Nada nears the book’s conclusion, and with the help of two colleagues, struggles to decipher its climactic secret, which would allow her to exorcise the demon at last – freeing not only the mysterious man whom he has possessed for centuries, but also, perhaps, her own imprisoned and forgotten love. Suspenseful and unforgettable, Phillip Ernest’s debut novel captures the most universal elements of human experience – even the monsters we face.

The Apocalypse of Morgan Turner

Author: Jennifer Quist
Date: March 2018
COURTROOM DRAMA / FAMILY

Morgan Turner’s grief over her sister’s brutal murder has become a rut, an everyday horror she is caught in along with her estranged parents and chilly older brother. In search of a way out, she delves the depths of a factory abattoir, classic horror cinema -- and the Canadian criminal justice system, as it tries her sister’s killer and former lover, who is arguing that he is Not Criminally Responsible for his actions because of mental illness. Whatever the verdict, Morgan -- with the help of her Chinese immigrant coworkers, a do-gooder, and a lovelorn schizophrenia patient -- uncovers her own way to move on. 
Watch the book trailer here.

The Philistine

Author: Leila Marshy
Date: March 2018
LITERARY FICTION / LGBTQ / MIDDLE EAST

Nadia Eid doesn't know it yet, but she's about to change her life. It's the end of the ‘80s and she hasn’t seen her Palestinian father since he left Montreal years ago to take a job in Egypt, promising to bring her with him. But now she’s twenty-five and he’s missing in action, so she takes matters into her own hands. Booking a short vacation from her boring job and Québecois boyfriend, she calls her father from the Nile Hilton in downtown Cairo. But nothing goes as planned and, stumbling around, Nadia wanders into an art gallery where she meets Manal, a young Egyptian artist who becomes first her guide and then her lover. 

Through this unexpected relationship, Nadia rediscovers her roots, her language, and her ambitions, as her father demonstrates the unavoidable destiny of becoming a Philistine – the Arabic word for Palestinian. With Manal’s career poised to take off and her father’s secret life revealed, the First Intifada erupts across the border.

Click here for Sophie Voillot's translation, La Philistine.

SHORTLISTED for the 2018 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize
SHORTLISTED for the 2019 Miramichi Reader Very Best Book Award
SHORTLISTED for the 2019 Expozine Literary Awards

Hutchison Street

Author: Abla Farhoud
Translation: Judith Weisz Woodsworth
Date: March 2018
LITERARY FICTION / JEWISH LIFE / MULTICULTURAL

With one side in Mile End and the other in Outremont, Hutchison Street is inhabited by characters from many different backgrounds, including a community of Hasidim and a writer whose newest project is a novel about the people she has lived among for thirty-nine years. She traces the life stories of an aging singer, a bag-lady who feeds birds in a back alley, an Italian widow who grows tomatoes in her front yard, a Jamaican woman who longs to dance the night away, and a young Hasidic girl who keeps a diary.

A moving account of isolated individuals attempting to reach out to one another in one of Montreal’s most diverse neighbourhoods.

What Is To Be Done?

Author: Mavis Gallant
Date: September 2017
THEATRE / CANADIAN

Mavis Gallant’s only play is a comedy that opens in 1942, in the heat of the battle against Fascism, when it was possible for Canadians to cheer both for Stalin and the Royal Family. At home in Montreal, Jenny, 18, takes evening courses, as there’s nothing else to do at night with the men off in Europe. She is impressed by her friend Molly’s copy of a political pamphlet written by V. I. Lenin entitled What Is To Be Done? The two young women spend their spare time on left-wing political activity in support of the Soviet Union, dreaming of the new world they’re sure will arise out of the ashes of the war. By May 1945, though, it’s all too clear that the returning veterans will take back the jobs the women have been working at, and all those dreams of a better future will be dashed. 

The play premiered at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre on November 11, 1982. Introduction by Linda Leith.

Dr. Bethune's Children

Author: Xue Yiwei. Translator Darryl Sterk
Date: September 2017
LITERARY FICTION / CHINA

Dr. Bethune’s Children tells the stories of the offspring of two ordinary families marked by cataclysms both natural and man-made. From the Cultural Revolution to the Tiananmen Square massacre, the novel unfolds against a backdrop of the international developments that have rocked everyday life from the Cold War to the emergence of the super power that China is today. Banned in China, Dr. Bethune’s Children is hailed as a masterpiece. In focusing on the distress and repression that have marked a whole generation, Xue Yiwei unveils the human heart.

This is the subversive novel that only Xue Yiwei could write. Like millions of other Chinese growing up since the 1960s, when Mao Zedong’s eulogy to Bethune was required reading in every elementary school, Xue Yiwei was Inspired by the Montreal doctor’s self-sacrifice (he died treating the wartime wounded) and his dedication to the Chinese regime. Unlike his peers, however, Xue Yiwei went to the lengths of moving to Montreal, where he has lived for sixteen years as an expatriate writer acclaimed in China and unknown in Canada. Until now.

Nan Goldin: The Warrior Medusa

Author: Martine Delvaux. Translator David Homel
Date: September 2017
LITERARY NON-FICTION / FEMINISM / PHOTOGRAPHY

In her new book, Nan Goldin: The Warrior Medusa, the feminist author Martine Delvaux links her own experience as a writer with that of the American photographer and installation artist Nan Goldin, whose life has been marked by the suicide of her beloved older sister Barbara, and who is best-known for her intimate portrayals of the sexual underground.

The Carpenter from Montreal

Author: George Fetherling
Date: September 2017
LITERARY NOIR

Worlds collide when a naïve young heiress takes a tumble for a bootlegger with a murderous temper and his business partner falls in love with Montreal, the way Americans are prone to do. One world war has ended and a second is in the wings. In the space between, the neon-powered city on the St. Lawrence is notorious for its lavish nightlife, obsessive gambling and evident corruption. Controlling the action from behind the scenes is a large and mysterious figure called the Carpenter. He is the city’s fixer, mediator and manipulator. He is the boss of the night, le caïd de la nuit. In this cinematic and genre-bending novel, George Fetherling both honours the roots of serious noir fiction while also pushing its boundaries.

Mr. Singh Among the Fugitives

Author: Stephen Henighan
Date: March 2017
LITERARY FICTION / SATIRE

R. U. Singh has always known he is destined to live the life of an English country squire. After a few false starts, in Bombay, Thunder Bay, and Toronto, he settles into a comfortable existence as a small-town Ontario lawyer, much solicited for the diversity he lends committees and conclaves. But—lest he forget—he is accepted only at the whim of his woman in white, a commanding university administrator, and by her whim can also fall. Mr. Singh Among the Fugitives sends up the multicultural aspirations of Canadian identity, pokes fun at our glitterati, and, tongue firmly in cheek, issues a warning: be careful who you pretend to be.

Arabic for Beginners

Author: Ariela Freedman
Date: March 2017
LITERARY FICTION / ISRAEL

When Hannah accompanies her husband and small children to Jerusalem for the year, she becomes fascinated with a group of expat women at her son’s daycare, as well as a young Palestinian woman named Jenna. As she grows close to Jenna, she starts to question her own marriage and her relationship to Israel. A novel of domestic and political ambivalence, Arabic for Beginners is about marriage, motherhood, friendship, nation, and the complicated ways we think of home.

WINNER of the J. I. Segal 2018 Mona Elaine Adilman English Fiction and Poetry Award

The Evil That Men Do

Author: Michael Blair
Date: March 2017
MYSTERY & CRIME

Riley becomes entangled in the wreckage left behind by a con man called Brandt who ran a Ponzi scheme on the West Island of Montreal. When the fifty-million-dollar scheme falls apart and dozens of people are left destitute, some of them are sure that Brandt’s wife Terry knows where he’s hiding out. Riley’s not convinced, but then Terry’s the woman Riley was living with when he left Montreal twenty years before.

Shenzheners

Author: Xue Yiwei. Translator Darryl Sterk
Date: September 2016
LITERARY FICTION / CHINA

The first book in English by acclaimed Chinese-Canadian writer Xue Yiwei, Shenzheners is inspired by the young city of Shenzhen, a market town north of Hong Kong that became a Special Economic Zone in 1980 as an experiment in introducing capitalism to Communist China. A city in which everyone is a newcomer, Shenzhen has grown astronomically to become a major metropolitan centre. Hailed as a Chinese Dubliners, the original collection was named one of the Most Influential Chinese Books of the Year in 2013, with most of the stories appearing in Best Chinese Stories. 

WINNER of the 2017 Blue Metropolis / Montreal Arts Council Prize for Literary Diversity.

True Arab Love

Author: Issa J. Boullata
Date: September 2016
LITERARY FICTION / IMMIGRATION, ARAB

Abdallah’s encounter with the military governor on the eve of his departure for America opens this collection of stories, and Khalil al-Ibrahami’s moving search for his lost fiancée in Jerusalem closes the collection. In between, Issa J. Boullata’s stories show what it’s like to be an Arab from Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, or Egypt making a new life as an immigrant in Canada or the United States. This is what it is, to be displaced. This is what it is to leave your home and start over in a new country.  

The Last Bullet Is For You

Author: Martine Delvaux. Translator David Homel
Date: September 2016
LITERARY FICTION / ROMANCE

This title is now out of print.
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept is the title of Canadian writer Elizabeth Smart’s classic hymn to love, which novelist Angela Carter once described as being “like Madame Bovary blasted by lightning.” Later, Carter wrote privately to a friend, saying that she would hate any daughter of hers to have to write such a novel, adding, “By Grand Central Station I Tore Off his Balls would be more like it, I should hope.”

And now along comes Montreal novelist Martine Delvaux with The Last Bullet Is for You. This stream-of-consciousness novel takes the form a love letter, but it is the last one. One last letter filled as much with the memory of love as the desire for revenge. Love is war, wrote Ovid, and this book is a battleground. Writing is both an act of passion and the means to end it once and for all. Writing is the last bullet, shooting through the love story and into what is left of the lover: a ghost, a fiction. And maybe that’s what he was from the start.

Women and Power The Case for Parity

Author: Pascale Navarro
Date: September 2016
PUBLIC POLICY / WOMEN

An LLP Singles Essay
It is already passé to ask if parity is important for today’s Canada. What’s needed now is to ask how we can make sure more women run for office and that they’re well-represented in government. There are no easy answers to this, but it’s clear that half-measures just won’t do. Pascale Navarro argues that quotas are essential for women to achieve parity with men in politics. Over a hundred other nations worldwide have already established parity as a goal. What are we waiting for?

Pascale Navarro is winner of the 2016 Governor General's Award in Commemoration of the Persons Case.

The Company of Crows

Author: Karen Molson
Date: April 2016
LITERARY FICTION / COMING OF AGE

At thirteen, bookish Veronica Reid lives in a world inside her head, even if she isn’t entirely successful at resisting the intrusions of the world outside. It’s bad enough that she has to wear awful new glasses; it’s downright disastrous that she’ll have to spend the summer at Laughing Willows Trailer Park with her obnoxious younger brothers and unhappy mother. She can’t imagine anything worse. Lonely and bored, she begins to observe the activities of the local crows, even as she gradually finds a community among the odd denizens of Laughing Willows, makes a friend in seventeen-year-old Charlotte, and falls in love. When she is sexually assaulted, she finds unexpected strength both inside herself and in the people—and the crows—around her. 

The Poet Is a Radio

Author: Jack Hannan
Date: April 2016
LITERARY FICTION / POETS

Li Bai has journeyed across the world and perhaps across centuries. When he comes across a bag of money in a downtown parking lot, we also meet the delinquent who lost the bag of money in the first place. The assemblage in Jack Hannan’s first novel are driven by wordsmithery, trickery, and flights of such fancy—for an instant, the signal comes in clearly, and we might all step into this world where anything is possible.

SHORTLISTED for the 2016 QWF Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction

Torp

Author: Michael Mirolla
Date: April 2016
LITERARY FICTION / FAMILY LIFE

Giulio di Orio, an assistant lecturer in Philosophy, brings one of his students, known as Torp to the Vancouver flat he shares with his wife Nicole. Soon their landlord is convinced that Torp is the devil incarnate, and the police have arrested him for the street bombings that have been plaguing the city. A sexually-charged tale bubbling with lust, suspected murder, and the twilight of the flower children—all set against the backdrop of martial law in 1970 Vancouver.

The Book of Faith

Author: Elaine Kalman Naves
Date: September 2015
LITERARY FICTION / JEWISH LIFE

Mordecai Richler meets Jane Austen In The Book of Faith. Faith, Rhoda, and Erica, affectionately known the Three Graces, are members of a liberal Jewish congregation in contemporary Montreal. Rabbi Nate wants a grand new synagogue; Marty, the congregation’s treasurer, harbours a raunchy secret; and Melly is a hard-nosed Holocaust survivor with an agenda. Award-winning author Elaine Kalman Naves’s debut novel is a delicious send-up of synagogue politics. It is also a paean to friendship.

SHORTLISTED for the 2016 Stephen Leacock Award for Humour

Counterterrorism and Identities: Canadian Viewpoints

Author: Jack Jedwab
Date: September 2015
PUBLIC POLICY / CANADA

The importance of analyzing public perceptions regarding national security cannot be underestimated when identifying counterterrorism approaches. Increasingly, maintaining public safety is considered a shared responsibility between the State and its citizens. Policy-makers seek cooperation with civil society and view community outreach as key to preventing terrorism. Public support and confidence is thus vital to institutions combatting terrorism.

Counterterrorism and Identities: Canadian Viewpoints monitors several factors shaping Canadian public opinion on terrorism. A detailed analysis of relevant and evolving perceptions is presented. This assessment is essential for researchers, policy-makers and community leaders looking to comprehend the mind-set of Canadians regarding terrorism.

Open Season

Author: Peter Kirby
Date: September 2015
MYSTERY & CRIME

A Guatemalan journalist is kidnapped, and the only message from her kidnappers is the murder of her lawyer. In a race against time, Luc Vanier sets about reconstructing her life, through the sordid world of human trafficking, the secretive underbelly of a multinational mining corporation, and the hiding places of desperate refugees. When Vanier is brutally warned off the investigation, he throws away the rule book and goes after the villains with a vengeance.

WINNER of the 2016 Arthur Ellis Award for Excellence in Crime Writing 

Sistering

Author: Jennifer Quist
Date: August 2015
LITERARY FICTION / FAMILY LIFE

The second novel by award-winning novelist Jennifer Quist is a black comedy of birth, death, love, marriage, mothers-in-law—and five sassy sisters. When Suzanne’s role as the perfect daughter-in-law ends in a deadly accident, she panics, makes a monumentally bad decision, and upends her world. The bond with her sisters is the strongest force Suzanne knows, and it may be the one that can keep her from ruin. Quist’s new novel is hilarious, spine-chilling, satisfying, and original. A romp.

Canada Lives Here: The Case for Public Broadcasting

Author: Wade Rowland
Date: August 2015
MEDIA & COMMUNICATIONS

Canada Lives Here tells the tumultuous story of public broadcasting in Canada, from its inception in 1933 to the CBC’s current, controversial attempts to adapt to collapsing revenues and new technologies. It explores in detail the struggle to preserve public space and foster community in an environment devoted to profit-making, arguing that the ideals of public service broadcasting are more relevant now than ever. Rowland, author of the influential Saving the CBC: Balancing Profit and Public Service (2013), identifies the issues crucial to the CBC’s survival and proposes carefully considered policy options. This is a book for everyone who wants to understand what’s really at stake with the threatened eclipse of the nation’s most important cultural institution.

Bitter Rose

Author: Martine Delvaux. Translator David Homel
Date: April 2015
LITERARY FICTION / COMING OF AGE

This title is now out of print.
A little girl is growing up in an Ontario village. Her father has taken off, and the world is full of dangers she doesn't understand. Her friends have names like Manon-just-Manon, BB, and Valence Berri, and things seem pretty okay, most of the time, except that girls keep disappearing. When she leaves the village for a suburb of Ottawa and then moves downtown and beyond, she never looks back.

True Believers

Author: Michael Blair
Date: April 2015
MYSTERY & CRIME

Things are slow for Burlington, Vermont, Private Investigator Hack Loomis, so he agrees to look into the disappearance of his assistant’s friend Belle Ryerson. Belle went missing after attending a meeting of a UFO group run by a charismatic psychiatrist and a disarmingly beautiful woman who claims to be in contact with an alien mother ship. Eccentric as the true believers may be, Loomis soon learns that it’s the people they believe in who are really dangerous.    

The Sicilian Wife

Author: Caterina Edwards
Date: April 2015
LITERARY NOIR

The Sicilian Wife is both a literary novel and a mystery. Fulvia, the Mafia Princess, must be a dutiful daughter or the family will be dishonoured. Though she eventually escapes and makes a new life in Canada, she is betrayed and then her husband is murdered on the Sicilian coast. The police Chief investigating the case is Marisa, who faces a station house of skeptical men as well as confronting Fulvia’s uncle, the boss of bosses. 

Interweaving folk tales, classical allusions, and recent Italian history with the conventions of the detective story in this powerful new novel, Caterina Edwards uses the literary noir to question the very possibility of justice and free will.

Sea Winter Salmon: Chronicles of the St. John River

Author: Mari Hill Harpur, with Eileen Regan McCormack
Date: March 2015
MEMOIR / HISTORY

Sea Winter Salmon is about a great salmon river, the St. John River on the Lower North Shore of Quebec, and its most important visitor, the illustrious Atlantic salmon. It was the Canadian and American railroad magnate James J. Hill who travelled the Gulf of the St. Lawrence and in 1889 established the log camp that has now been in the family for five generations. A family memoir and a guide to a river’s ecology and the life cycle of the Salmo salar, the book is also about what it takes to be a good conservationist in a remote and delicate region.

Author and photographer Mari Hill Harpur tracks the special relationship between the salmon and the people of the river through diaries, legal documents, scientific data, rare archival photographs and her own photographic collection. Dramatic, tragic, amusing, and authoritative, Sea Winter Salmon addresses itself to readers of history, biography, and conservation biology – and to fisher women and men everywhere.

The Wrecking Ball

Author: Terry Mosher (Aislin)
Date: October 2014
POLITICAL CARTOONS

The Wrecking Ball is a collection of Aislin’s recent favourite cartoons. All of the choice political material is here: Pauline Marois as Miley Cyrus, the Parti Québécois’s Charter of Quebec Values, student demonstrators wandering through Montreal’s deteriorating streets, corruption inquires and Montreal’s succession of mayors, the Harper Tories and the Canadian Senate debacle, the coronation of Justin Trudeau, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, the Habs and the Sochi Olympics. Whew!

CLICK HERE for the Mostly Mosher bundle: Was It Good For You + The Wrecking Ball for the low price of $30 (+ shipping)!

Sons and Fathers

Author: Daniel Goodwin
Date: September 2014
LITERARY FICTION / FAMILY LIFE

Sons and Fathers is a novel about men. It tells the story of how three men use their talent to help and hurt each other – and compete with the accomplishments of their fathers.

Three friends, three sons, each with a talent for words he learned from his father. Eli, Michael, and Allan were friends at McGill, and their lives continue to intersect as they make their ways in the shadow of the Peace Tower in Ottawa.

Set against the backdrop of national politics, journalism, and spin, Sons and Fathers explores how men’s lives and their relationships with one another and their wives are ultimately shaped by their relationships with the first men in their lives: their fathers.

A Migrant Heart

Author: Denis Sampson
Date: September 2014
BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR / IRELAND

A Migrant Heart is about departures and arrivals, uprooting and attachment, resettling and returning. Denis Sampson left Ireland as a student, leaving behind the farming countryside of his childhood, the city of Dublin where he was educated, and the history and culture of his native country. He arrived in the cosmopolitan city of Montreal and discovered he was not the only one in search of a new life; and then that search became his life. He also discovered many different ways to return to Ireland, until slowly, what was painfully forced apart was rejoined in a life lived in two places and cultures.

LLP's first international print publication, published February 2015 in the UK and launched at Books Upstairs in Dublin on March 10, 2015, 6 - 8.30 p.m. 

A Second Chance

Author: Felicia Mihali
Date: April 2014
LITERARY FICTION / FAMILY LIFE

Adam is happily married when he has a stroke at the age of fifty, and his behaviour changes to that of a ten-year-old. What are his secrets? His wife would like to know.

A Second Chance reveals its secrets slowly. We can see how changed Adam is, but we also sense that we don’t know the whole story. The wife is loving, but there is a puzzling edge to her account of her days with Adam. Some members of their immigrant community know the story, but most do not. It’s only as we come to the devastating conclusion that we learn about the affair that almost ended the marriage before Adam suffered his stroke. A novel about devotion and betrayal, A Second Chance is also about forgiveness.

The Bells of Memory: A Palestinian Boyhood in Jerusalem

Author: Issa J. Boullata
Date: April 2014
BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR / PALESTINE

An LLP Singles essay
Issa J. Boullata grew up in a Palestinian family in the Jerusalem of the 1930s and 1940s, when Palestine was under the British Mandate. His memoir, The Bells of Memory, is delightful in its reflections on an idyllic youth and detailed in its recollections of family members, classmates and teachers, remembered scents and foods, the pleasures of reading, and his early experience of the working world. This is a love letter to a Jerusalem that was changed immeasurably by Al-Nakba, the Palestinian Catastrophe of 1948 that dispossessed the Palestinians of their homeland and dislocated many as refugees when Israel was established. 

SHORTLISTED for the 2014 QWF Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction

The Prostate: Everything You Need to Know About the Man Gland

Author: Dr. Yosh Taguchi
Date: March 2014
HEALTH & MEDICINE

The mere mention of the prostate gland is enough to make men cringe. Long a taboo subject, the walnut-sized man gland can cause mental anguish, emotional aggravation, bitterness, and anger. The prostate often affects everything from sexual performance to male ego-strength. When it is working well, the man’s world is good, but when it is affected by change or disease, the male universe often collapses upon itself.

In The Prostate, Dr. Taguchi tackles the most common prostate problems, treatments, and questions in down-to-earth language. If there is anyone who can dispel the fear associated with prostate issues, it is Dr. Taguchi. Required reading for all men over the age of forty.

Vigilante Season

Author: Peter Kirby
Date: October 2013
MYSTERY & CRIME

Montreal’s Hochelaga district is in the throes of gentrification, its drug dealers and prostitutes are disappearing, and Luc Vanier suspects the neighbourhood cleanup may involve murdering the unwanted. The local Police Commander sees only declining crime rates and his improving career prospects, and is willing to go easy on a local militia group that’s expanding its influence. When Vanier is suspended for brutality, he’s on his own. As the threats against him mount, he continues to probe the dark side of progress, fighting to discover who controls the streets. Have the government and police stepped back to allow the militia to impose order? Is the militia the price of order when governments run out of money?

In Vanier's Montreal, thugs and lowlifes rub shoulders with the elite, and Peter Kirby follows up his critically acclaimed debut The Dead of Winter ("an auspicious debut from a writer to watch"- The Globe and Mail) with a riveting novel of corruption and street crime.

The Girls of Piazza d'Amore

Author: Connie Guzzo-McParland
Date: September 2013
LITERARY FICTION / IMMIGRATION, ITALY

A quintessential Calabrian love story. The Girls of Piazza d’Amore traces the lives of three village girls and the forces that lead them to leave home for a new life across the ocean. Set in southern Italy in the 1950s, Connie Guzzo-McParland’s short novel walks us through the piazza and the narrow alleys of her own childhood, imaginatively recreating an entire world as seen through the eyes of a young girl who accompanies her friends on their evening passeggiate to the spring water fountain and carries their love notes to the boys they love. The joys of Calabrian village life are palpable, and so are its frustrations and heartbreaks, but this is a world on the cusp of irrevocable change, as family after family is leaving. And that’s what is most heartbreaking of all.

SHORTLISTED for the 2013 QWF Concordia University First Book Prize

Love Letters of the Angels of Death

Author: Jennifer Quist
Date: August 2013
LITERARY FICTION / FAMILY LIFE

A breathtaking literary debut, Love Letters of the Angels of Death begins as a young couple discover the remains of his mother in her mobile home. The rest of the family fall back, leaving them to reckon with the messy, unexpected death. By the time the burial is over, they understand this will always be their role: to liaise with death on behalf of people they love. They are living angels of death.  

In spare, heart-stopping prose, the transient joys, fears, hopes and heartbreaks of love, marriage, and parenthood are revealed through the lens of the eternal, unfolding within the course of natural life. 

A Green Reef: The Impact of Climate Change

Author: Stephen Henighan
Date: August 2013
ESSAY / CLIMATE CHANGE

An LLP Singles essay
The impact of climate change on our physical environment can be difficult for us to understand or imagine. Moving from a memoir of a journey, through an abundant yet fragile natural world, to the daunting scientific evidence that climate change will lead to the degradation of nature and upheaval within society, this essay offers a lucid personal approach to the pivotal dilemma of our time. In a wide-ranging discussion that embraces science, history, art, language and identity, A Green Reef offers the reader an understanding of what climate change means for life on earth.

The Dead of Winter

Author: Peter Kirby
Date: July 2013
MYSTERY & CRIME

Inspector Luc Vanier is drinking his way through Christmas Eve when he is called out to investigage the murder of five homeless people. His investigation takes him into the backrooms of the Catholic Church, the boardrooms of Montreal’s business elite and the soup kitchens and back alleys of street life in winter. The Dead of Winter is the first in Peter Kirby's acclaimed series of Luc Vanier crime novels.

Shortlisted for the 2013 Arthur Ellis Best First Crime Novel Prize

Saving the CBC: Balancing Profit and Public Service

Author: Wade Rowland
Date: March 2013
ESSAY / MEDIA & COMMUNICATIONS

An LLP Singles essay
Do we want a public broadcaster? A trenchant analysis of the threat to our national broadcaster and a solution for radical change. Rowland draws on over thirty years experience in television production, network news management and media studies to present a plan to satisfy the country’s private broadcasting lobby and at the same time rejuvenate the CBC. Not since the Great Depression has there been such an opportunity for public service broadcasting in Canada to become all that it can be on all media platforms–and rival the best in the world.

Clerks of the Passage

Author: Abou Farman
Date: September 2012
ESSAY / MIGRATION

An LLP Singles essay
Migration stories, says Abou Farman, are often told through the personal struggles and travails of the migrant, "the great voyager figure of our most recent centuries, the harbinger of hybridity, the metaphor for risk, sacrifice, toil, abuse, inhumanity. And humanity." These are the stories (both horrific and redemptive) that we hear about in the news, in taxis and airports, in bars and corner coffee shops. They are both real and existential, shared, denied, argued about, internalized. Clerks of the Passage takes us on a journey in the company of some strange and great migrants, from the 3.5 million year-old bipedal hominids of Laetoli, Tanzania, to an Iranian refugee who spent seventeen years in the transit lounge at Charles de Gaulle airport, from Xerxes to Milton to Revelations, from Columbus to Don Quixote to Godot. 

An international literary debut. Cover and interior illustrations by the author.

Are We On Yet? Insider Secrets on How to be Interviewed (and other essential media skills)

Author: Tommy Schnurmacher
Date: August 2012
MEDIA & COMMUNICATIONS

“Forget radio. Forget TV. Forget who is the interviewer and who is the interviewee. All you have to do is pretend that the interviewer is someone who is sitting next to you on the plane.  That’s it. You should have the exact same kind of conversation as you would have on that plane. Because that’s all a great interview is, it’s a great conversation.”

Many people are unaware of this basic technique, and other tips that are equally simple to learn and adopt. Whether you’re the new owner of a small business, a seasoned entrepreneur selling a product or service, a volunteer promoting a great cause, or an author promoting yourself, the techniques and tips outlined in this book will turn you into the guest they beg to come back.

Caricature Cartoon Canada

Author: Terry Mosher (editor)
Date: July 2012
POLITICAL CARTOONS

This title is now out of print.
Caricature Cartoon Canada is “the best of the best”: a brilliant collection of personal favourites from Canada’s best cartoonists, published in both official languages. In it, editor and legendary Montreal Gazette cartoonist Terry Mosher (Aislin) has provided notes on the history of Canadian cartooning and an unforgettable snapshot of contemporary Canadian concerns and attitudes – some quite controversial – illustrated through the wit and wisdom of the country’s premier cartoonists.

Was It Good For You?

Author: Terry Mosher (Aislin)
Date: July 2012
POLITICAL CARTOONS

Was It Good For You? It was really good for Aislin! This a collection comprises Aislin’s favourites drawn over the last three years. It is his 45th book. He is aiming for fifty.  Montreal’s infrastructure is crumbling at a faster rate than any city in North America – and there lurks Aislin amongst the thousands of orange construction cones, sketchbook in hand. Nationalism in Quebec would appear to be going through death throes while Aislin watches, just as he has since the beginning, pencil at the ready. Was It Good For You? Is a collection of Aislin’s favourites drawn over the last three years. It is his 45th book. He is aiming for 50. Foreword by Rick Mercer.

CLICK HERE for the Mostly Mosher bundle: Was It Good For You + The Wrecking Ball for the low price of $30 (+ shipping)!

The Darling of Kandahar

Author: Felicia Mihali
Date: April 2012
LITERARY FICTION / IMMIGRATION

In 2007, a Canadian soldier stationed in Kandahar sent a letter to Maclean’s magazine thanking the editors for the cover of their annual University Student Edition, which featured a young Canadian woman of Romanian descent, who became the new “pin-up” girl for the soldier and his comrades.  Headlines flashed “The Darling of Kandahar", inspiring Romanian-Canadian writer Felicia Mihali’s first novel in English. The soldier, Sergeant Christos Karigiannis, died a short time after he wrote the letter.  

Keeping the Public in Public Education

Author: Rick Salutin
Date: April 2012
PUBLIC POLICY / EDUCATION

An LLP Singles essay
Is there anything public schools do that no other form of education can? Only this: Simply by being what they are, they can teach kids about the society they live in. That's because public schools must let everyone in. What's unique about public education isn't the education part; it's the public.

Keeping the Public in Public Education is the first in Linda Leith Publishing's pioneering Singles series of short essays published in print and electronic form.