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February 2021Je suis le courant la vase
by Marie-Hélène Larochelle
Athletic Centre, Toronto. Under her coach's watchful eye, a swimmer struggles against the liquid element to improve her time and earn a spot in national competitions. The training sometimes continues outside the athletic center, in his apartment, where she must submit to rituals designed to free her from her resistance. Marie-Hélène Larochelle's novel recounts this relationship of power and desire. It tells of what one must sometimes embrace to reach the highest levels of athletic performance. Readers follow the athlete and her team as they train and compete, swimming and almost drowning with her in all kinds of waters. Je suis le courant la vase echoes the recent revelations that shook the sport world, and despite all the chlorine and salt that suffuse the text, the experience leaves a feeling of being dirty and bruised.
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September 2021La pierre au milieu d'eux tous
by Caroline Renédebon
In the garden of her Parisian home, the narrator discovers by chance a modest tombstone. Haunted by the deceased’s date of birth, which except for the year, is the same as her own, she becomes intimate with a discreet and disturbing presence that settles in her life. A century after Marie’s death, leaving Paris to settle in Quebec, the narrator feels more than ever the urgency to write in order to give back, fictitiously and with a moving respect, an existence to someone she knows nothing about. What to do with what is only a name but is nonetheless a life that ends in the middle of a war at the age of thirty-six? Alternating between excerpts from notebooks written since 2017 and a story set against a historical background, La pierre au milieu d’eux tous is the imagined delicate portrait of a woman who escapes the shackles of early 20th century conventions through imagination, dance and the secret relationship she builds with her daughter.
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August 2021Sur la route des grandes sagesses
by Jean Bédard
The story begins in Galilee, around the year 30. Jairus, a young rabbi, questions his own religion as well as the Greek materialism preached by his wife, both of which only breed hatred. This is the time when a strange carpenter from Nazareth offers to stop the violence with love and reconciliation. “Good for the children,” thinks Jairus, choosing Instead to take over his father’s business (trading in rare manuscripts on the Great Silk Road). Across the deserts, mountains and vastness of Persia, Kashmir and Tibet, Jairus and his daughter will face the usual cruelties of civilisations, and encounter priests of Zoroaster, Buddhist monks, Taoist sages... The beauty of the world and the wisdom of a few masters will transform them. When Jairus returns to Galilee thirty years later, he will no longer be insensitive to the actions of the famous carpenter who has turned the whole of Jerusalem upside down, the same one who once brought joy to his daughter when she was in the throes of despair. This story is based on a deep knowledge of history, customs, human nature and the main philosophies that still condition human existence. This novel, with well-crafted and engaging characters, offers unforgettable scenes where humour and love, depth and lightness give us hope. The author’s quest is expressed in simple, everyday, contemporary language. An ideal read for those who are not looking for life guides, but for an intimate metamorphosis that expands the heart.
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September 2021L'horizon des évènements
by Biz
Reprising the characters from his 2017 novel La chaleur des mammifères a few years later, Biz here casts a sociological look on academia, in the time of trigger warnings, snowflakes and cancel culture. With humour, he depicts the fear that grips those who are supposed to educate but who grovel to preserve what they have acquired, namely a job, and some power. The result is the portrait of a milieu that no longer knows what it stands for... Filled with references to brilliant writer of ill repute Louis-Ferdinand Céline, this tragicomedy raises the question of teaching at a time when everyone’s sensibilities mustn’t be offended and when ignorance is bliss, always preferable to knowledge that hurts.
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September 2021Plie la rivière
by Audrée Wilhelmy
With an ever powerful writing, carried away by the animal strength that takes her back to the raw world of Oss – where the uniqueness of her literary universe was revealed – Audrée Wilhelmy delivers a tale of full maturity whose erotic spell will bewitch readers. Noé, known as the Little One, leads this amoral story of male trinity – of father, son and bear – through her body, first as a child and then as a woman. A fetish character in Audrée Wilhelmy’s work, Noé, the untamable, the implacable, the insubordinate, meets young Emessie, a travelling candy salesman who criss-crosses the continent in his horse-drawn cart every year. This time, however, losing his virginity to Grumme – the obese shopkeeper – and magnetised by Noé, he’ll serenely overcome the fear of the secret beast within him: perhaps this totemic bear that the little girl will have first tamed by the animistic impulses that make her an initiatory character through whom others are fulfilled. This text, as delicate as amber, once again gives the measure of an immense writer.
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August 2021Symbiose
by Normand Chaurette
In the therapeutic world of Symbiosis, a workshop for personal growth that is still being developed, a dozen test subjects in their early thirties are brought together. During these experiments, physical aggression is encouraged in order to overcome the contradictory forces that coexist within each person. Based on the premise that each person is his or her own worst enemy, this form of art therapy promotes supervised partnerships between the trainees, aiming to explore their positive strengths in order to achieve recognition of their self-destructive instincts and reconciliation with themselves. However, this programme is compromised by the death of Michael Ropa, one of the participants, who is found brutally murdered on the workshop premises. Through a detective story in which the main characters are suspected of murder, this novel tells the story of two brothers, Alex and Jay-Rémi, who were separated as teenagers and who meet again around the memory of a mysteriously suppressed childhood. Through the eyes of Alex, a visual artist trapped in the violence that runs through his work, Symbiose depicts the distorted relationships that unite members of a struggling generation in their quest for light and salvation.
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August 2021Léonore
by Linda Amyot
Shaken by a heartbreaking tragedy, Léonore’s family is trying to look forward and get back to normal life. In her difficult transition from elementary to high school, the young girl can count on her grandmother, who tries to make up for the absence of her parents and bring a little joy to the home. When her teacher asks the students in her class to recount the story of their year, wounds are reopened. The façade everyone displays sometimes hides painful stories. What will Leonore tell? Each new book by Linda Amyot conveys the same beauty and enchantment. From this novel rise strong teenage characters that life puts to the test.
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August 2021De son oeil
by Maryse Pagé
Anju, a lonely and introverted teenager, speaks inwardly to Noah, the most popular student in his school, whom he considers his ideal: Noah is handsome, brilliant, a leader, athletic, ambitious, and empathetic. He is person Anju admires, to whom he tries to get closer, someone he would like to resemble. To the point of becoming one with him. Anju offers Noah remedial maths in exchange for basketball lessons. He monitors his social media posts and hooks up with Megan, who resists to this more-than-perfect being. A student trip to New York offers him the perfect opportunity to spy his idol and his devoted fans even more. His plan seems to work: Noah gradually takes him under his wing and introduces him to rap. However, a disturbing event puts a stop to his almost obsessive voyeurism and opens his eyes to the lure of appearances...
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March 2021Trash anxieuse
by Sarah Lalonde
Struggling with an unlimited quota of fear, the novel’s main character is constantly bombarded by her thoughts. Her mother travels to Italy with her new flame. Her father cries in the shower. The planet’s carbon footprint is at an all-time high. Her friends have told her off. She must deal with eco-anxiety, eviction, influencers, social media, the moral contradictions of our time. Fortunately, she can rely on Régis, her homeless friend, and the singleparent waitress at the local snack bar, on Orion. But most of all, she can count on life-saving writing and acts of rebellion; on the happiness spreading all around, and on the future that’s just around the corner. Fluctuating between bitterness and tenderness, harshness and sensitivity, demands and indulgence, mixing caustic dialogues, sitcom scripts and poetry in a fragmented narrative, Sarah Lalonde’s voice both hurts and consoles.
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January 2020Dire l'autre
Appropriation culturelle, voix autochtones et liberté d'expression
by Ethel Groffier
In the summer of 2018, Quebec experienced a brutal introduction to the notion of cultural appropriation when one of its most famous playwrights, Robert Lepage, had two of his productions cancelled in the face of protests from activists who criticized him for representing their reality without their consent and for featuring very few members of their community. In an accessible, clear and nuanced essay, Groffier sets out to explain the origins, overarching concepts and implications of the cultural appropriation debate. Groffier uses the experience of Canada’s Aboriginal peoples as an example, and argues that they are still struggling to find ways to tell their own stories. The questions she poses, however, go beyond this specific case: Who has the right to represent others and their reality without distorting its meaning and usurping its legitimacy? And, above all, who decides? In Dire l’autre [Voicing the Other], Ethel Groffier does not take a position, but suggests that any agreement on cultural appropriation with Aboriginal people must involve a renewed dialogue based on reconciliation.
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September 2021L'après-vie de George Cartwright
by John Steffler
George Cartwright : gentleman, aventurier, soldat et chasseur. Mort, aussi, dans son Angleterre natale, le 19 mai 1819, jour que son esprit errant revit sans cesse depuis cent soixante-dix ans, avec pour seule compagnie son faucon et son cheval. Observant le monde poursuivre sa course, Cartwright se remémore sa vie. De sa première affectation militaire en Inde à son passage dans l’armée prussienne, en passant par son commerce et son entreprise de pêche dans les terres vierges du Labrador, son récit emmène le lecteur dans un voyage époustouflant à travers ses succès et ses déceptions. En revivant sa première traversée vers le Labrador, ses plans ambitieux pour favoriser le commerce avec les Inuits et son installation sur place, Cartwright comprend peu à peu pourquoi il reste confiné dans sa solitude. Malgré la noblesse de ses intentions, après la fin désastreuse de sa relation avec l’Inuite Caubvick et son peuple, Cartwright perd un à un tous ceux qui lui importaient. Après cent soixante-dix ans passés à revivre la même journée, il touche enfin à la sérénité dans la conclusion surprenante et mystifiante de ce roman étonnant.
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March 2021Parole tenue
Les nuits d'un confinements - Mars-Avril 2020
by Wajdi Mouawad
Between Monday 16 in March (Day 1) and Monday 20 in April 2020 (Day 35), Wajdi Mouawad held twenty-five chronicles on the website of Le théâtre de La Colline that were widely followed and occasionally taken up by other European theatres. These texts, written in one go in the evening and at night and then recorded in the morning, are gathered in the present collection. Confined like millions of us within the four walls of his house in Nogent-sur-Marne, Wajdi Mouawad undertakes an odyssean dazzling interior journey from his own microcosm — home schooling, his Japanese maple tree, house cleaning, his disconcerted cat, pacing in the alley ; the subjects are varied — to the cyclopean eye of the Big Bang where dead stars shine. He takes us to Peter Handke's office and his father's retirement home, to the banks of the St. Lawrence River, to Montreal, to Greece, to Greenland, to the Lebanon of his childhood. Through Kafka and Star Wars, via French phonetics and the Apollonian temple of Delphi, he waltzes the madness brought on by the pandemic on the razor's edge, sharing the same dream as the members of the human tribe, making the sleeping brutality of the everyday roar. In so doing, he grinds away the darkness and manages to find bright solace at the end of a long tunnel. His incomparable writing traces the map of a fantastic territory, the beasts of a new mythology, the singular letters of a new Wajdian alphabet. Wajdi Mouawad writes at night. His plays, novels and essays all go through some form of darkness, some opacity, a fog, that dissipates as the words take shape. In the nights of this confinement, which has become the confinement of his nights, in the depths of the abyss explored, beyond the dazzling darkness, the writing of these chronicles has allowed him — has allowed us, by listening to them — to cure some of the blindness which has struck us.
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October 2016Le boulevard
by Jean-François Sénéchal
Chris has the body of a young man and the mind of a child. On the day of his eighteenth birthday his mother leaves their home, forcing him to cope with life on his own. At first overwhelmed by despair, he manages to regain his strength and to support himself working as the caretaker of the building he lives in. In order to ease his sorrow and loneliness, he talks to his absent mother, telling her of his everyday life – his walks along the suburban boulevard, his visits to the flea market, his emotional disappointments, his sometimes incredible adventures… Seemingly helpless, the endearing innocent and kind character who shows unusual strength and maturity befriends people, sparking a relationship of mutual support. The generous community with a working-class background will become the family that Chris has missed all his life. With Le boulevard (The Boulevard), Jean‐François Sénéchal tells a story that’s in turns funny, touching and deeply moving, a lesson in hope and resilience, written in a simple and singular language of harrowing beauty.
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2015Le nénuphar et l'araignée
by Claire Legendre
You’re scared of spiders, afraid of heights, illness, and the opinion of others. You’re terrified to be betrayed or abandoned, and you’re petrified to the idea that the little gypsy fortune-teller’s predictions may come true. So you stop smoking, you shun insects and medical confidences; you avoid the stage, the airplanes, you don’t fall in love and you don’t lean over balconies. You never take your driving test and you begin reading novels from the last page, like you’d wear a chastity belt. You think you’re ready, that you’ll never be caught off guard, and that nothing can happen to you. Until they discover a butterfly in your chest and you can feel its fluttering wings. Then you simply can’t pretend to ignore it. Le nénuphar et l’araignée is an autobiographical story about fear that explores the symptoms, the sources, and the origins of anxiety, from the most intimate to the most ordinary.
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October 2023The Flavour Atlas
1,500 Creative Pairings and Innovative Recipes
by Raphaël Haumont, Thierry Marx
A practical, easy to use, mouth-watering book on the science of food pairing written by renowned Michelin star chef, Thierry Marx and physicist, chemist, and researcher, Raphael Haumont. Packed with 4-colour drawings of 80 fruits and vegetables and 1,500 creative pairings with at a glance aromatic wheels and recipes proposed by the Chef. Discover how a duo or a trio of aroma components can wake up your tastebuds and smell. A book to bring out your culinary creativeness while learning the role of chemistry behind different ingredient pairings.
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September 2022Oenologix
Everything you Need to Know About Wine
by François Bachelot, Vincent Burgeon
First prize in the “illustrated wine book” category at the Gourmand Awards 2023 Follow the adventures of three colleagues, Lucien, Charlotte and Jean, throughout a year of winegrowing, and discover wine in all its forms: grape varieties, production, tasting, conservation, pairing, wine-growing regions... Along the way, you will learn everything you need to know, including why a good wine is like a good film or a homemade ratatouille, why it is better to drink champagne as an aperitif than for dessert, and how cycling can help you understand Burgundy wines. The first graphic novel to explain everything about wine over a 12-month period combining humour, scenarios and colour drawings. Each chapter has a notebook containing the main maps and diagrams to help you learn more.
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October 2023Geostrategix 2
Understanding the World and International Relations
by Pascal Boniface, Tommy
Based on a scenario by Pascal Boniface and illustrations by Tommy Dessine, this graphic novel explains the geopolitical history of the first part of the 21st century. The 110 strips illustrate a hundred or so key topics that have marked the world and changed international relations and geopolitical balances even more rapidly since the year 2000. A fascinating two-colour graphic novel plunges us into world history, explaining in a simple and humorous way the events that have marked our time.Part 1: The international scene. Globalization. An international community? The UN, the G7 and the G20. The Brics. International justice. The actors of international relations: States, multinational firms, NGOs, public opinion, other actors. The factors of power. Part 2: Regional areas. Europe. The United States. Asia: China, Korea, Japan, India. Russia. Africa. Latin America. The Arab world. Part 3: The major geopolitical challenges. Wars. The nuclear challenge. Terrorism. Organised crime. The climate. Demography. Migration. Democracy. Digital and artificial intelligence. Sport. Epilogue
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March 2023Go to Your Room!
Setting Educational Limits for Your Child
by Caroline Goldman
The toddler spontaneously explores the world in a chaotic way, guided by instinct and pleasure. From the age of one, however, they need the adults around them to help them give a more structured format to their relationships and behaviour.Many parents rightly refuse to give in to the ordinary educational violence of yesteryear. They endeavour to follow the principles of positive education, and to tirelessly explain and repeat the taboos to their child. Despite this, they find themselves confronted with a deterioration in their child's attitude - refusal of authority, intolerance to frustration, verbal, and physical aggression, etc. This short, didactic book, written without a lot of double talk by a clinical psychologist and mother of four children, is a plea for the return of common sense in education. The author places the learning of limits at the centre of a serene psychological development by pointing out the pitfalls of positive discipline. Using a practical and very detailed roadmap, she justifies the use of a single non-violent educational action to quickly resolve the child's behavioural problems and in turn re-start the virtuous circle of peaceful relationships and self-confidence.
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September 2023Islamic civilisation
by André Miquel
André Miquel, a great specialist, and lover of this extremely rich and complex universe, has written a well-documented and scholarly vision of the multifaceted forms of Islam which is more than ever present at the heart of international political life. He presents, in this now classic work, a global vision of Islam, through a historical, political, economic, cultural, and religious approach spanning fourteen centuries. The author understands Islam as a whole, without omitting the differences and particularities that constitute the very richness of this religion. Henry Laurens has rewritten and updated the final chapter which considers the orientations of the last decade, in particular the importance of the Middle East conflict and the rise of terrorist activity. A vast updated chronological table completes this essential text.
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May 2023Marie Curie on the Beach
Discover Elementary Particles From a Deckchair
by Marco Zito
A young Polish woman who arrived in Paris in 1891, Maria Sklodowska was at the origin of a scientific revolution, that of the physics of the infinitely small. Her discoveries are at the heart of our understanding of matter. She was the winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903 and the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1911. Sit back in your deckchair and let Marco Zito guide you through the world of atoms. When you leave your deckchair, you will never look at the world in the same way again.
