What I know about youEric Chacour
Éric Chacour’s manuscript was so complete that at Alto, it was once believed that an author from the house wanted to put the editorial process to the test. A dazzling story of a love which will force a doctor who until then had bowed to his destiny to leave his native Egypt, What I know about you is overwhelming thanks to this language which knows how to translate with the elegance of a goldsmith these moments when life reveals all its colors. But if this first novel is so striking, it’s because there is nothing more moving than seeing someone finally become themselves, no matter the consequences.
What I know about you
Alto
296 pages
HotlineDimitri Nasrallah
“The only language spoken in this work is that of the heart,” wrote columnist Rima Elkouri about Dimitri Nasrallah’s fourth novel, translated by Daniel Grenier. The Montrealer of Lebanese origin offers one of his most endearing mother characters to a Quebec literature which was already populated with them: Muna, a French teacher who had every reason to believe that she could flourish in her native Quebec. ‘adoption. A book that would only be sad, because 1986 looks a little too much like 2023, if the son did not inject all his affection for his own mother.
Hotline
The People
376 pages
Fortresses and other refugesRafaële Germain
Is memory, in reality, just another form of fiction? Rafaële Germain explored this vast question in An infinite present (2016), and digs again in this story of three memories, a generous and makeup-free portrait of his mother, the late and flamboyant press secretary Francine Chaloult, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. The former queen of chick reads also reveals a lot about herself, and continues one of the most astonishing reinventions of Quebec literature of the last 20 years. A writer with economical poetry, she knows how to enshrine an entire world of intimate devastation in formulas of merciless grace.
Fortresses and other refuges
Quebec America
128 pages
FormattingMikella Nicol
The truism has rarely been more true this year than between the pages of Formatting : there is nothing more universal than the intimate. By examining his own obsessive practice of fitness, Mikella Nicol places in the dock a society which, very early on, taught her, through popular culture or through the voices of those close to her, that a woman should not only be in control of her body, but that she wasn’t safe anywhere. She thus lets herself be guided by her disturbing intuition that “violence and beauty define femininity in equal measure”, without the reality around her going out of its way to contradict her.
Formatting
The Horse of August
160 pages
Usually fullÉtienne Tremblay
Mathieu mistakes his dreams for reality, and that’s good, because reality can be well, well flat, when you have just finished high school and have to show up every evening at a suburban gas station. Critical of the absurdity of the world of work, a mass grave of hopes to which adults obey with too little resistance, this coming-of-age novel highlights with great humor the arrogance of a soft-hearted person who believes himself to be extraordinary, while recalling that adolescents, if they lack perspective, look at the renunciations and compromises of their elders with a view of undeniable insight.
Usually full
Red Herbs
320 pages
Galumpf, Marie Hélène Poitras
In the last chapter of this collection of short stories, Marie Hélène Poitras describes the dizzying power of her passion for literature and for horses, by erecting a monument to an animal that has galloped into another dimension. It thus illuminates all of his work, rooted in a melancholy of loss. Loss of candor. Loss of a loved one. Loss of a place where, for an eternity or the time of a perfect song, it will have been sweet to be alive. More than 20 years after her first book, the writer is more than ever this master of significant atmospheres, a virtuoso who measures each of her effects.
Galumpf
Alto
192 pages
Granby in the simple pastAkim Gagnon
After the fireworks (the backfire?) of excess and toilet scenesA cigar on the lips, Akim Gagnon embraces his tender side in this prequel to his first novel. Portrait of an adolescence torn between her father’s bouts of euphoria and the gray cloud that still haunted the ruined family home, Granby in the simple past pays homage, with irresistible self-deprecation, to the oxygen that cinema will become for a sensitive boy who, otherwise, would have been faced with a blocked horizon. The most disarming of odes to the father, precisely because the son does not mask his faults at all.
Granby in the simple past
The Wick
416 pages
The version that interests no oneEmmanuelle Pierrot
“Now I’m going to speak, and one day I’m going to die but, in the meantime, I’m not going to keep my bitch mouth shut,” Sacha announces – and she’s not lying – in the prologue to The version that interests no one, a novel of misadventures and disillusionment, which sets its scene in a Yukon where even the marginalized will turn out to be as stupid as the others. For more than 350 pages, Emmanuelle Pierrot maintains a striking force worthy of a compact hardcore punk song. Books carrying such an enthusiastic rumor rarely live up to the hype. buzz.
The version that interests no one
The Quartier
368 pages
LourdesCatherine Lemieux
In this age where it is more important to publicly display one’s virtue than to actually work to transform the world, and where you will be rewarded for having said the right thing, even if you did the wrong thing, Catherine Lemieux opposes a murderous satire of university microcosm. A twisted fable unfolding around a conference held by the Laboratoire du Néo-Moi Féminisant, this novel, whose opaquely dark humor is perhaps only an acute form of lucidity, chops up a medium where self-presentation triumphs over all. The funniest, or most tragic, book of the year, depending on your point of view.
Lourdes
Boreal
368 pages
Every wound is a promiseSimon Brousseau
Faced with the relentless announcement of his father’s diagnosis, who died 14 months later from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Simon Brousseau had to put aside fiction. In striking language, stripped of all artifice, because all ornament seems vain in the face of death, a son, himself a parent, wonders what good it can be to exist, when we know that everything will eventually change. on the side of suffering and mourning. He finds comfort in the wisdom of the Stoics, in the smile of his daughter and in his fond memories of the time spent with the man of his life.
Every wound is a promise
Heliotrope
210 pages