Literary return to school | The 10 Quebec books of 2024 that we can’t wait to discover

Do you like books? U.S. too. Here, in 10 Quebec novels and stories, is the list of our desires for the coming months.

The Tarantula NebulaMélissa Verreault

Do the memories you have of an event sometimes diverge radically from those held by those around you? This is what happens in any case to Mélisa (with an s) in The Tarantula Nebulanew novel by Mélissa (with two s) Verreault, the author of The anxiety of the goldfish (2014), which has clearly lost none of its chic for intriguing titles. Why does this teenage love, who no longer wanted to know anything about her, come back and confess his burning passion to her? Why don’t her parents keep the same images of her childhood as her? Why do his perceptions differ so much from those of others? Lots of questions, yes, and the answers are still a few weeks away.

1^er FEBRUARY

The miracleWilliam S. Messier

Associated with the return to Quebec literature of the imagination with a capital I through colorful characters, both ordinary and larger than life, William S. Messier (Dixie, Epic, Basketball and its fundamentals) explores the territory of the intimate for the first time in this self-narrative entitled The miracle. At 15, the man who nicknamed himself Will Bill learned that the slightest unfortunate movement could have severed his spinal cord. Seal ! It’s the story of a guy “who measures his luck”, therefore, and who is today living proof that miracles do indeed exist in this world.

March 5

Novel without anythingAntoine Charbonneau-Demers

With Coco, winner of the Robert-Cliche prize for first novel in 2016, Antoine Charbonneau-Demers revealed the fascinating mixture of oblique humor and real pathos, which will permeate the rest of his inimitable work, in which life is often a theater and sexuality , an obsession that costs as much as it pays. Presented as “a turning point” in his journey, Novel without anything brings to life an absurd imagination, thanks to a gallery of characters whose names alone promise a lot, including Lol, the fatal leprechaun, Paris Dulove, the tortured author, Wayne Walters, the not-so-cheerful motivational speaker, and Zéphyrine Montagne, Antitheatrical actress from Nice. Say no more, we are already convinced.

March 11

A certain art of livingDany Laferrière

The cover of the new Dany Laferrière shows the Japanese writer lying down, fully dressed and with red Converse on his feet, in a bathtub, with a book in his hands, and around him, a glass of wine, tomatoes and bananas. A scene that seems to encapsulate the spirit ofA certain art of living, a “wisdom book” for big kids, bringing together under the same cover maxims, reflections, reveries and other haikus, written last summer in a hotel in Borneo. Once put end to end, these brief texts draw, says the academician, “a naive self-portrait like those child’s drawings which move me so much”.

12th of March

machineLula Carballo

With Creatures of chance, Lula Carballo signed in 2018 one of the most memorable first works of the last 10 years, in which the author’s mother played slot machines and her grandmother played roulette. The Quebecer of Uruguayan origin goes from story to novel in machine, a fiction set in a casino, where Luz is hired in order to understand from the inside the pathological gambling that is plaguing her family tree and, perhaps, to domesticate what is brewing inside her. There she becomes friends with Madame B., a fan not of Marjo, the singer she celebrated in her previous book, but of Leonard Cohen.

March 13

CivilizedPatrick Senécal

Twelve individuals agree to be cut off from the world for two weeks, in order to undergo a scientific experiment aimed at “studying and analyzing the behavior of humans when they find themselves in a specific group and in a particular context. » No, Patrick Senécal’s new novel does not, fortunately, focus on Big Brother Celebrities, but on “a very immersive, very stimulating adventure, but which will require physical and psychological adaptation to situations that are not always easy. » Situations that we promise are as horrible as they are hilarious. Which, when you think about it, still looks quite a bit like Big Brother Celebrities.

March 28

Glass peopleCatherine Leroux

A perfectly understandable human instinct, although stupid, that of opposing reality to fiction, the harshness of the world as it unfolds for real and the evanescence of the imagination. However, the work of Catherine Leroux shows that the questions posed by our present benefit from being explored in greater depth thanks to the devices of a literature freed from the strict constraints of realism. Glass people thus seems to adopt an uchronistic perspective analogous to that of his previous book, The future (2020). Set in a Montreal gripped by a serious housing crisis, this fifth novel features Sidonie, a journalist who investigates disappearances that have occurred in homeless camps.

April 2

On the heights of Mount ThoreauCatherine Mavrikakis

Remove from Catherine Mavrikakis’s work all the pages that directly or indirectly concern the sprawling question of death, and see for yourselves to what extent there won’t be much left. The author of Bay City Sky and D’Oscar De Profundis reconnects with her obsession by accompanying a quartet of sisters, the youngest of whom suffers from incurable cancer, to a clinic which promises to transform her big departure into a “grandiose moment of creativity”, nothing less. “But is the unpredictable pain of the end of life really soluble in an aesthetic or a medical procedure? », asks this book which highlights our arrogance in the face of our common destiny.

April 3

Rue DuplessisJean-Philippe Pleau

After In the time of hurried thoughthis collection of chronicles as touching as they are sagacious published last year, the host of Think in voice high adopts an even more intimate voice in this account of his childhood in Drummondville in the heart of a family with little education. Nicely subtitled My little darkness, Rue Duplessis explores a rich subject, that of social class defectors, which several notable books have recently tackled (including those by Edouard Louis and Caroline Dawson). “A love letter addressed to his parents”, it is announced, as well as an ode to education, thanks to which the trained sociologist was able to break away from his intransigent destiny.

April 4

The unsightlyClaudia Larochelle

We know Claudia Larochelle as the columnist with enlightened enthusiasm, as well as the creator of Doudou, a favorite character of little ones. The writer, who published in 2011 a memorable collection of short stories entitled Good girls plant flowers in spring, for its part remained in the shadows for a long time. Here it resurfaces thanks to collection III, each of whose titles is built around personal memories. “One of the advantages of getting older,” observes the one who will return to it in particular on her arrival in the (not always) wonderful world of the media, “is certainly to better manage disenchantment, to no longer wait for flowers or look for them. ” Wise.

May 21st