Tales of the Emperor is based on the life of Qin Shi Huang (circa 260–210 BCE), the “First Emperor” – he who unified China, gave it his name, built the Great Wall, entombed an army of terra cotta soldiers, authored legalism, erased history, insinuated governance, and established paranoia as a national characteristic. There’s only one principal theme: you find the antiquity you look for, or, in the language of the book: “history is the study of the paintings of great events.”

A sweeping historical novel about the collision of Native and colonial cultures.

Eight lesbian women strive to achieve an all-female utopia within which homophobia and their own pasts and differences are abolished.

Set in the post-apocalyptic future, this is a novel of fragments that represents contemporary prose at its most daring and experimental.

Singularly obsessed with Anna, the object of his adolescent desire, photographer Christophe Langelier embarks on an extraordinary journey—which takes him from the streets of Montreal to the Island of Women off the coast of Mexico—to escape the all-consuming flames of his unrequited passion. The Bicycle Eater is a comic, surrealist novel of metamorphosis unleashed by hopeless desire, a riotous, colourful burlesque where nothing and no one remain what they seem.

A young waitress recounts her trials and surprising allies in a lifelong battle against social stigma.

In this third instalment of Tremblay’s Notebook trilogy, Céline records into a notebook details of her tempestuous relationship with Gilbert.

Farrant continues her assault on the unaccountably disaffected and disillusioned of the Western world with her eighth volume of extremely short stories.

Witty and formally innovative stories that examine social, political and sexual assumptions with an ironic eye.

Let yourself be excited and delighted. Farrant’s artfully spare stories – averaging a couple of paragraphs each – offer enough food for thought (and mood) to keep you going for months. Dip in occasionally to be reminded of the strangeness of us, or read from beginning to end and immerse yourself in a slightly skewed version of reality – one in which people are frank and the world is unforgiving as it shimmers like light on water, sometimes blinding, always dazzling.

This third volume in the Chronicles of the Plateau Mont- Royal —an epic series of novels which imagines the lives of the characters of Tremblay’s plays—deals with an explicitly gay thematic: Tremblay’s metaphor for the Québécois desire for a more glamorous identity on the world stage.

Tremblay’s first novel is an affectionate and funny chronicle of the lives of a family in its community.

The fifth novel in the Chronicles of the Plateau Mont-Royal juxtaposes the childhood experiences of the fat woman’s son and his gifted cousin.

Explores the life of one immigrant Jewish family, from early 1933, through the war years and into the early 1950s.

It’s May 1922, wedding preparations are in full swing, and old memories, past desires, and big regrets threaten to turn the big celebration into a big melee.

A delightful collection of seventy miniature fictions and comics riffing on the theme of happiness, The Great Happiness offers a series of lively antidotes to the current climate of doom. Some of the book’s miniatures are narratives with a twist, others are imaginative flights, such as the recently dead experimental…

Every house has its secrets, but none hides them better than the august home of Delorme family in Montreal.

A hilarious yet compassionate look at the new male consciousness taking shape in a “post-feminist” world by a witty, articulate raconteur.

A fusty academic falls in love with a young actor who also has a four-year-old son.

Remarkably engaging stories recounted by different residents of a northern Canadian village facing a gradual but devastating transformation.

Young Dorothea is appointed by the tourist bureau to direct a documentary film re-enacting life at a lighthouse off Quebec’s North Shore in the 1940s and 50s. The problem is that most of the memories of Rose Brouillard, the interview subject, are invented, not real. But, really, who cares whether it’s true? What matters here are the stories we tell.

Devastated by grief and loneliness, Edgar, an asocial thirty-seven-year-old, kneels in the cemetery where his recently deceased mother is buried. Turning away from her graveside for a moment, Edgar witnesses a terrifying and life-altering event: through the mist that sweeps overhead like the ghostly skirts of mothers passed, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse brutally rape a young woman, leaving her for dead. Acting out of muddled instinct (and ingrained Catholic conviction), Edgar bears the unconscious victim home in the trunk of his mother’s sedan. Disgusted yet moved by the woman’s appearance, Edgar solemnly pledges to act as her saviour.

Written in the tradition of Umberto Eco and Manuel Puig, The Pagan Wall is a first novel by one of Canada’s master storytellers.

An extraordinary novel about art and passion inspired by the lives of two great artists, Evelyn Rowat and René Marcil.

Ten years in the making, these stories display Bowering’s meticulous attention to the details of his craft.

The second in the Notebook trilogy follows Céline Poulin as she becomes hostess in a transvestite bordello. Tremblay celebrates how it is possible for Céline to embrace her difference and to flourish in solidarity with a community of others with transcendent eloquence and compassion.

A novel about mountains by one of Canada’s greatest writers on nature, depicting the heart’s desire to go beyond mountains.

An industrial biography that investigates personal myths and the great “machines” that drive the world to the abyss of development.

This tell-all book by M.A.C. Farrant is a three-part novel-length work of prose fragments, snippets, questions, speculations and meditations, by turns philosophical, dark, comedic and lyrical, it attempts to imagine a multitude of possible futures for our garrisoned world.

An affair born of a correspondence with a distant admirer leads the lovers to an arranged meeting in Australia.

A badly injured man. A nationwide power failure. A village buried in snow. A desperate struggle for survival. These are the ingredients of The Weight of Snow, Christian Guay-Poliquin’s riveting new novel. After surviving a major accident, the book’s protagonist is entrusted to Matthias, a taciturn old man who agrees…

In The World Afloat, a collection of seventy-five irreverent and humorous “miniature” stories, M.A.C. Farrant coaxes her readers from their well-worn, earthbound narratives and into a world afloat on satire, absurdity, and, in her most brilliant moments, expansive joy.

Jane Rule’s first collection of short stories.

In this second Plateau Mont-Royal novel, three schoolgirls live the mysteries of their rites of passage.

This collection of short fiction includes stories spanning the decades of O’Hagan’s experience as mountain guide, gentleman adventurer and storyteller.

In this contemplative novel-poem, Jean-François Beauchemin invites us to share in the inner world of the grieving Mr. Bartolomé, who, following the mysterious disappearance of his young son, wanders and wonders, seeking to transcend his pain by encountering something larger than himself. Continuously occupied by the memory of his lost son, Bartolomé’s quest leads him from the city to the countryside and then to the edge of the ocean, where he marvels at the beauty of nature but cannot penetrate its mysteries.

The sixth and seventh novels of the critically acclaimed Desrosiers Diaspora series In If by Chance, the great Ti-Lou, the famous She-Wolf of Ottawa, returns to Montréal after a fruitful career in the royal suite at the Château Laurier, where she welcomed diplomats, men of the world, politicians, and ministers…