Literary return | The 10 most anticipated arrivals from Quebec at the start of 2023

They are so pure, our January ambitions, while the hope of being able to read everything has not been clouded by the mourning that will soon be imposed by the too few hours of which our days are made up. While there is still time to pretend that nothing is impossible, here is what arouses the enthusiasm of The Press among the rich arrivals of the coming months.

CabalMichael Delisle

The essential Michael Delisle once again delves into the themes dug into my father’s fire (2014), those of the magnitudes and pains of filiation, with Cabal, a story of rivalry between two brothers. When their father resurfaces after 30 years “of dodges and tricks, of stays in prison or in Florida”, the youngest son, Paul, refuses to believe in the promised metamorphosis, while the eldest, Louis, s clings to the idea that the father will reconnect with his responsibilities.

Boreal (January 17)

Still, Marie Darsigny

Author of the cult book Thirty (2018), Marie Darsigny tries in this “tale of quiet drug addiction” to think differently about the delicate subject of alcohol and drug addiction. Borrowing again from essays, narratives and autofiction, the poet summons the figures of Amy Winehouse, Billie Holiday and Marguerite Duras in order to criticize the medicalization and commodification of recovery and, above all, to ask whether it is possible to extricate oneself from the “traditional pattern which goes from the fall to the redemption”.

Editions du remue-ménage (February 14)

what are youCaroline Dawson

Still buoyed by the phenomenal success of Where I land, Caroline Dawson launches a first book of poetry, in which she speaks to her 7-year-old son, the age she was when she arrived in Quebec. She thus hopes “to inherit not shame, but nothing less than the beauty of the world”. Promising excerpt: “I return step by step / by the periphery / to my mother’s language / her tears taste of the dust being cleaned / with the back of the hand / words that my son does not understand”.

Triptych (February 15)

Fortresses and other refugesRafaele Germain

With the exception of an essay on the prison that the present has become (An infinite present) and a four-handed book written with Dominique Fortier, Rafaële Germain has not published anything since U-turn and uneasiness (2012), the third volume of one of the most popular Quebec series that emerged from what was called the chick bed. She continues her reflection on memory in Fortresses and other refugesan intimate story, inhabited by the memory of his parents and animated by a fruitful question: what do we want to keep from what the world has deposited in us?

Quebec America (March 21)

TombNorman Chaurette

Faced with the immeasurable pain of Normand Chaurette, the publisher Pierre Filion offered him in the weeks following the death of Marie-Claire Blais, in 2021, to write a tomb, this eulogy in honor of a deceased person. On August 27, 2022, four days before his own unexpected departure, the author of What dies last submitted a second and final version of his tribute to the one who will have been for him a tutelary figure. “Rarely has a declaration of debt taken the form of such a powerful song,” says Nancy Huston.

Lemeac (March 22)

Heroines and tombsDaniel Grenier

After his test The Constellations (2020), Daniel Grenier reinvests fiction with Heroines and tombsan adventure novel in which a journalist leaves for Brazil in the footsteps of the writer Ambrose Bierce, to whom we owe a Devil’s Dictionary, and which would have been shot more than a hundred years ago. Continuing his exploration of the American continent, the author of The longest year also wonders about a concern dear to our present, that of the responsibility incumbent on those who tell the stories of others.

Heliotrope (March 22)

FormattingMikella Nicol

Following a devastating breakup, the narrator of Formatting double-locks himself in his room and engages in a frenzied practice of fitness, but, against all expectations (or not), “the promises of the influencers do not help him to feel better”. Somewhere between autobiographical narrative and essay, the third book by Mikella Nicol, one of the most insightful writers of her generation, continues to shed light on what, in the intimate and on the street, constrains the freedom of women. .

The August Horse (March 28)

I will travel around the worldAlexandra Szacka

Journalists do not only tell the world, they always tell themselves, thinks Alexandra Szacka, who does not tell herself a little in this story intertwining the personal journey of a teenager who had to leave Poland at the age of 16 years and that, professional, of one of the correspondents abroad having the most marked Radio-Canada. She comes back in I will travel around the world behind-the-scenes coverage of some major events of our time and catches up with some of the main characters from his most memorable stories.

Boreal (March 28)

GalumpfMarie-Helene Poitras

Marie Hélène Poitras the novelist has not been idle in recent years, she who published in 2021 The desire and in 2022 Suddenly the Minotaur, a new version of his implacable first book. Its faithful readers have longed for a long time to reconnect with Marie Hélène Poitras the short story, the one revealed in 2005 Mignonne’s death and other stories. It will soon be done thanks to Galumpfa collection “at the intersection of wounds, desire, selfishness and caring, the exact and difficult place where the act of empathy takes shape”.

Viola (April 11)

Granby in the past simpleAkim Gagnon

A sort of prequel to his explosive first novel, Granby in the past simple sets its scene in the heart of the mobile home in which Akim Gagnon grew up alongside his father (the endearing Pop, big fan of KISS, whom we have already fallen in love with through The cigar at the edge of the lips) and his brother, Carl-Camille. A tender and fragrant portrait of “ordinary poverty in the region”, this foray into the Princess of the Townships also tells of the refuge that a teenager will find in the theatre, the cinema and the viewfinder of his camera.

The Wick (May 10)