The title refers to the huge letter Q on the office tower of Hydro-Québec, the province-owned electricity company, on the eastern edge of downtown Montreal. In 1974, nineteen-year-old James wakes up after the first night with his new, separatist boyfriend:  "The kittens had awakened me. As Sébastien slept, I raised myself to peer outside his bedroom window. Big, fluffy flakes of snow were still gently falling. The twin rows of kitchen window sill...

'Like Angela Carter, she is relentlessly inventive' Sunday Times'Entrancing and antic and sensual as a dream' GuardianThe second novel by the author of The Lonely Hearts HotelLonglisted for the Baileys Prize 2015At birth, Nouschka forms a bond with her twin that can never be broken.At six, she's the child star daughter of Quebec's most famous musician.At sixteen, she's a high-school d...

Welcome to the hilarious, strange, elegiac, outrageous world of David Sedaris!In Naked, Sedaris turns the mania for memoir on its ear, mining the exceedingly rich terrain of his life, his family, and his unique worldview-a sensibility at once take-no-prisoners sharp and deeply charitable.A tart-tongued mother does dead-on imitations of her young son's nervous tics to the great amusement of his teachers; a stint of Kerouackian wandering is undertake...

The bestselling and infamous diary of a high-class call girl, as seen on the show starring Billie Piper.Belle de Jour is the nom de plume of a high-class call girl working in London. This is her story.From the summer of 2003 to the autumn of 2004 Belle charted her day-to-day adventures on and off the field in a frank, funny and award-winning web diary. Now, in her Intimate Adventures, Belle elaborates on those diary entries, revealing (among other things) h...

Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies meets Rachel Cusk’s The Lucky Ones in this astounding debut novel about a woman on the verge of infidelity.Tessa is a thirty-seven-year-old real estate agent living in Montreal. She adores her husband and three young sons, but she’s deeply unhappy and questioning the set of choices that have led to her present life.After a surprising run-in with Francis, her ex-boyfriend and first love, Tessa arranges to see...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this moving, poignant novel by the bestselling author of Birds of America—and a master of American fiction—we share a grown woman’s bittersweet nostalgia for the wildness of her youth."An enchanting novel." —The New York TimesThe summer Berie was fifteen, she and her best friend Sils had jobs at Storyland in upstate New York where Berie sold tickets to see the beautiful Sils portray Cinderella in a...

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2016 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZESHORTLISTED FOR THE 2016 KOBO EMERGING WRITER PRIZEMost of the things Pillow really liked to do were obviously morally wrong. He wasn't an idiot; clearly it was wrong to punch people in the face for money. But there had been an art to it, and it had been thrilling and thoughtful for him. The zoo was also evil, a jail for animals who'd committed no crimes, but he just loved it. The way Pillo...

A book that will make you see yourself clearly for the first time. When Becky Randle's mother dies, she's whisked from her trailer park home to New York. There she meets Tom Kelly, the world's top designer, who presents Becky with an impossible offer: He'll design three dresses to transform the very average Becky into the most beautiful woman who ever lived. Soon Becky is remade as Rebecca - pure five-alarm hotness to the outside world and an awkward mess of cankles and split ends when she...

One of the best-known experimental novels of the 1960s, this uninhibited tale centres on the hapless members of a love triangle, and their sexual obsession and shared fascination with a mythic saint.Revolving around four central – and intrinsically flawed – characters, ‘Beautiful Losers’ is the frank and humorous story of a nameless narrator, his wife Edith, their domineering friend and mentor ‘F’ and Catherine Tekakwitha, a mythic 17th-century Mohawk virgin saint. The complexities...

Afterwards, if it's warm, I'll make my way through Hemingway and Fitzgerald's old neighbourhood near the St. Suplice to the Jardin de Luxembourg and its parterres of pistachio green chairs for a stroll among the statues. Or join other flavour-obsessed habitues at the atmospheric organic market on leafy Boulevard Raspail, where string bags are filled with dewy pears, tiny limes, bundles of fresh basil and thyme, heirloom tomatoes, sleek leeks and elegant asparagus stalks so chic they could ...

'She writes with such panache, such extraordinary perception and wit, that not a single sentence is wasted.' Elizabeth Day'A forensically brave writer, acutely attuned to life's randomness, with a semantic virtuosity rarely equalled.' Telegraph'A fiction writer with as fine a bead on contemporary life and relationships and absurdity as anyone writing today. . . . Startling, painful, funny.' Elle

The Shawbridge Boys Farm, just north of Montreal Quebec, has been reforming children for more than a hundred years. Thousands of stories can be collected from the children, adults, and seniors who have lived on "The Farm". This is a story of just one of them, but it can't be told without including many about the kids who were there with her.This is a true tale of a teenage girl who, in 1983, refused to go to school and became a ward of Quebec's juvenile system, eventually making her...