What could be better, in summer, than to lose yourself in contemplation in front of the river? This is the invitation extended to us by short story writers Camille Deslauriers, Joanie Lemieux and Valérie Provost in the collection What I know of the shores (Full Moon Editions, June 13). In 21 stories, one of which was a finalist for the Prix de la Nouvelle de Radio-Canada, they invite readers in the Bas-du-Fleuve, mainly at Pointe-aux-Anglais, in the footsteps of various characters from all ages, sailing from realism to fantasy.
In The thirst that I have (Cheval d’August, August 14), where he transports us to Sherbrooke, Marc-André Dufour-Labbé, who will also publish a children’s novel, Plaid Kid (Leméac, August 16), draws inspiration from 1990s rock and cinema to paint the portrait of a hoodlum converted into a car salesman… and jar in a residence for the elderly. A single-parent father, he finds the time to deal with the heartaches of his buddies of brush. Soon, he risks losing custody of his one-year-old daughter.
“Children are born in cabbage, you can buy cabbage at the grocery store, you can buy children. Professor in the Department of Literary Studies at UQAM, Louis-Daniel Godin has written a first novel, The account is good (La Peuplade, August 16), which promises to be happily disarming, as much by its orality and its rhythm, borrowed from Hervé Guibert, as by the reflections on money and on the love of a child from poverty, Jean-Daniel, adopted as Loulou, his Bout d’chou doll.
With our neighbors
The pandemic will have inspired the prolific Jodi Picoult (A thousand little nothings, Actes Sud, 2018) a story where she is interested in the tricks that fate plays. Occupying a dream job, Diana, almost 30 years old, is just waiting for her lover to propose to her. As the couple prepare to travel to the Galápagos Islands, he is held up in hospital, but insists that she go to their destination. Alas! The action of I wish you were here (translated by Marie Chabin, Actes Sud, in bookstores) takes place in early 2020…
When it’s not a pandemic that upsets destiny, it’s a war or a hurricane. First novel by Eric Nguyen, The loneliness of storms (translated by Clément Baude, Albin Michel, June 21) recounts the fate of Hýõng, a Vietnamese woman who arrived in New Orleans in 1978. While the eldest, nostalgic for his native country, joins a Vietnamese gang, the youngest, who feels American, dreams of being a writer and coming out of the closet. In 2005, hurricane Katrina bring together, reluctantly, the mother and her sons.
Second part of the diptych initiated with The passenger (Olivier, 2023), StellaHusbands (translated by Serge Chauvin, L’Olivier, June 23), by the venerable Cormac McCarthy, takes place 10 years earlier, in 1972, in Black River Falls, Wisconsin. We follow the conversations between Alicia Western, a brilliant mathematician of great beauty traumatized by the participation of her father, a physicist, in the development of the atomic bomb, and Doctor Cohen, her psychiatrist, at the Stella Maris Institute where the first is interned.
A week after being kicked out by Simon, with whom she was living on Long Island, Alex is broke and doesn’t know where to go. She then returns to Simon’s, in full celebration of Labor Day. Famous for The Girls (Quai Voltaire, 2016), her first novel, where she was interested in the young women of the Manson family, which will soon be the subject of a TV series, Emma Cline is back with The guest (translated by Jean Esch, La table ronde, June 28).
From across the Atlantic
In Oblique Sun and Other Irish Stories (translated by Marie Hermet, Albin Michel, June 21), Donald Ryan (All we are going to knowAlbin Michel, 2019) scrutinizes the Irish soul in some twenty moving short stories, but not devoid of humor, populated by characters as complex as they are earthy, which he places in the local pub, in a retirement home or on the docks.
Having had to give up her studies to take care of her sick father, Maria has become, like the other girls in the village, a “carrier” of foodstuffs and ammunition since the start of the Great War. Tribute to the courage of women in times of war, rock flower (translated by Johan-Frederik Hel Guedj, Stock, July 31), by Ilaria Tuti (ash girlRobert Laffont, 2023), transports us to Italian Friuli threatened by Austrian bombs.
Journalist specializing in legal chronicles and news items, Dimitri Rouchon-Borie is also a novelist (The Demon of Wolf Hill, Tripod, 2021). In star dog (Tripode, August 17), he sketches the portrait of Gio, in his twenties, whose fate changed after someone pierced his skull with a screwdriver: “I don’t blame anyone because thanks to that, I went to the hospital and I encountered something there that I can’t explain, but it happens at night. »