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Time to revive an old habit: Seven books to take out and about this summer

Greatly varying in style and genre, these books are page-turners that will make for fine companions on the beach — or your beach equivalent.

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The world changes, but reading is eternal. Especially summer reading. Here, then, presented in no special order, are seven book recommendations for the season. Greatly varying in style and genre, they are nonetheless all page-turners that will make for fine companions on the beach — or your beach equivalent, whatever it might be — in the coming weeks.

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Guy Delisle’s Factory Summers (Drawn & Quarterly, 152 pp, $24.95) sees one of the great modern-day cartoonists in top form. Best known for his acclaimed series of graphic novels portraying the experiences of a harried everyman in various international cities — Jerusalem, Shenzhen, Pyongyang — Delisle now delves into his teen years, when he was employed at a Quebec City paper mill and groping toward his artistic vocation. The grinding blue-collar workaday life Delisle describes is of a kind sorely under-represented in contemporary literature, and he maintains a parallel narrative about his troubled relationship with his estranged father, who works upstairs in the same factory, in management, but is a near-phantom presence in his son’s life. This is a work of real originality and power. Factory Summers was translated by Helge Dascher and Rob Aspinall.

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The cast of Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers includes Lebanese Montrealer Hassan Kattoua, gained a degree of fame when he took up his colleagues’ anti-Uber cause.
The cast of Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers includes Lebanese Montrealer Hassan Kattoua, gained a degree of fame when he took up his colleagues’ anti-Uber cause. Photo by John Kenney /Montreal Gazette file photo

In Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers (Biblioasis, 276 pp, $22.95) Marcello Di Cintio takes the time and trouble to engage with a cross-Canada range of people representing a profession too often taken for granted. Most of them are immigrants; all of them are subject to scarcely conceivable challenges and obstacles, often exacerbated by the onset of Uber. The cast includes two Lebanese Montrealers. Hassan Kattoua gained a degree of fame when he took up his colleagues’ anti-Uber cause with an ingenious media-savvy combination of grassroots protest and guerrilla theatre. Meanwhile, the presence in the book of renowned novelist Rawi Hage, who cheerfully admits to having been a less-than-stellar cabbie (“At some point you have to acknowledge that you have no clue,” he tells Di Cintio), provides the opportunity to push back at the notion that “an immigrant succeeds only once he stops doing the sorts of jobs immigrants do.”

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Absentmindedly gazing down into the alleyway behind her Mile End apartment late one night, an exhausted woman sees something that might be a body being put in the back of a vehicle and driven away. Thus begins Pascal Girard’s Rebecca & Lucie in The Case of the Missing Neighbor (Drawn & Quarterly, 96 pp, $24.95), translated by Aleshia Jensen. A young mother uses her maternity leave to engage in some amateur sleuthing. Was that mysterious event connected to the disappearance of a neighbourhood heath-care worker, by any chance? Don’t let Girard’s light touch with both visuals and plot fool you: this is a graphic novel with the heft and rewards of any mystery fiction you’d care to name.

The Family Way by Christopher DiRaddo (Véhicule Press, 418 pp, $22.95) is the second instalment in what’s shaping up to be a long career. DiRaddo’s 2014 debut, The Geography of Pluto, is a largely autobiographical bildungsroman that sees a young gay man forging his identity in the low-rent Montreal of the 1990s. For the followup, DiRaddo takes roughly the same character into his 40s, when he has decided to donate his sperm to lesbian friends who want a child. It’s an endlessly rich (and hitherto surprisingly under-utilized) premise on which to base a novel, and DiRaddo makes the most of it, lacing the narrative with humour, trenchant social observation and true poignancy. Every bit as steeped in the author’s home city as the work of Mordecai Richler, Michel Tremblay and Heather O’Neill, it’s an eloquent demonstration of how the very idea of what constitutes family has evolved and grown.

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Tawhida Tanya Evanson deftly balances poetic, impressionistic writing with the forward-momentum requirements of narrative fiction in Book of Wings.
Tawhida Tanya Evanson deftly balances poetic, impressionistic writing with the forward-momentum requirements of narrative fiction in Book of Wings. Photo courtesy of Véhicule Press

Book of Wings by Tawhida Tanya Evanson (Véhicule Press, 150 pp, $19.95) sees a leading light in the spoken-word scene venturing for the first time into extended fiction. Charting the gradual dissolution of a relationship in a series of far-flung locales, Evanson deftly balances poetic, impressionistic writing with the forward-momentum requirements of narrative fiction. She is very good at conveying the sensory essence of a wide variety of settings — perhaps because of her grounding as a performer, her prose has an immediacy that makes it easy to imagine it being read aloud. While reading a book like this during COVID can feel like a wistful reminder of a bygone age when travel was a less complicated matter, it’s sure to work equally well as we start moving around again.

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First published in 2015, Pascale Quiviger’s Si tu m’entends was made accessible to English readers in 2020 as If You Hear Me (Biblioasis, 342 pp, $19.95), a heartening sign of the continuing trend for cutting-edge French-language Quebec fiction crossing over. The novel, an engrossing combination of experimental and conventional techniques, was brought back into the spotlight last month when its English translator, Montrealer Lazer Lederhendler, won the Governor General’s Award for the job. (It’s his third in the category, and possibly his last in a while, as he’s taking a sabbatical to work on other projects.) Exploring the aftermath of a man’s workplace accident and subsequent lapse into a coma, the novel provides a challenge that anyone who appreciates unflinching fiction — say, Emma Donoghue’s Room — will relish.

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The novel If You Hear Me was brought back into the spotlight last month when its English translator, Montrealer Lazer Lederhendler, won the Governor General’s Award for the job.
The novel If You Hear Me was brought back into the spotlight last month when its English translator, Montrealer Lazer Lederhendler, won the Governor General’s Award for the job. Photo by Pierre Obendrauf /Montreal Gazette file photo

A young contingent of the Newfoundland diaspora that has made its way to Montreal is making its presence felt on the literary scene. Eva Crocker leads the way, having been long-listed for the Giller Prize in 2020 for All I Ask (House of Anansi, 320 pp, $22.95). Set in St. John’s and peopled with a rich cast of beleageured young idealists, it’s a quintessentially contemporary story of digitally induced anxiety, fraying trust of police, burgeoning Indigenous activism, violated privacy and much more. Crocker’s writing uncannily inhabits uniquely modern mind-states: the disorientation when a system that makes us utterly dependent on our phones and computers suddenly denies us access to them, the insidious ripple effect when what we have assumed is our private life is suddenly shown to have been under the eyes of strangers. 

ianmcgillis2@gmail.com

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