On the bedside tables of our booksellers

Throughout the month of July, booksellers tell us what their current must-reads are. This week: Cassandre Sioui, co-founder of the Hannenorak bookstore in Wendake, reveals her favorites of Indigenous literature.

Laila Maalouf
The Press

Nanabush’s Kiss

“He’s a very prolific Ojibway native author. In this book, he depicts the trickster — he’s a prankster, a troublemaker in native mythology — in the form of a man who arrives on a motorcycle in a community and is going to mess up people’s daily lives a bit. It’s really very funny, there’s a lot of humor, the dialogues are tasty; the author skilfully mixes the supernatural with the real, as we find in various aboriginal universes, especially in English Canada at the moment. I think it’s a perfect mix between tradition and modernity. He is an author to discover. »

Nanabush’s Kiss

Drew Hayden Taylor, translated by Eva Lavergne

Speaking

Heat the outside

“The author is an Innu poet from Mashteuiatsh, a community near Roberval. In this collection, the starting point is a breakup. It will allow him to go back to the past and to the beautiful moments shared with the loved one. Despite the pain, the feeling of loss, it is a poetry that is rooted in the carnal side and, at the same time, in popular culture and territory. […] It’s like a balm for the heart, it feels good to read this collection; one has the impression of finding oneself with the narrator at the edge of the river, of hearing the wind in the trees. It’s very touching, very funny at times and very sensual too. »

Heat the outside

Marie-Andree Gill

The People

We don’t cry at bingo

“This is the first novel by one of my favorite authors, which was translated a few years ago. We follow the alter ego of the author, from childhood to adulthood. […] We instantly become attached to the characters as if we had always known them, even if it takes place in another province, in a remote Aboriginal community. With Dawn Dumont, there is always a lot of humor, a lot of self-mockery. She has a gift for tackling sometimes difficult subjects, such as the history of residential schools, without being tearful or falling into pathos, thanks to irony. It is a reading that feels good, which can be read in one go and which allows us to enter into the Aboriginal question, but from another point of view. »

We don’t cry at bingo

Dawn Dumont, translated by Daniel Grenier

Hannorak