House of Anansi Press

A searing account of three interconnected global crises that defined the 2010s, and a powerful invitation to respond with compassionate solidarity.

In Ebola, Bombs, and Migrants, Dr. Joanne Liu, former International President of Doctors Without Borders, draws on frontline experience to examine three major humanitarian crises of the 2010s, revealing the global obsession with national security and its capacity to overshadow our responsibility to protect vulnerable populations.

Since the early 2000s, a world shaped by 9/11 has retreated into fear, strengthening borders and eroding the mechanisms of international cooperation. From West Africa to the Mediterranean and into Afghanistan, Dr. Liu shows how, despite the best efforts of frontline responders, the international community has repeatedly chosen containment over compassion, and politics over principle.

This urgent, authoritative work urges readers to connect past tragedies to current circumstances, reckoning with the cost of disengagement to ultimately reclaim a vision of shared humanity in the face of global crisis.

Exiled from his community after serving time for his father’s murder, a young Innu man finds himself adrift on the streets of Montreal.

Released from prison after ten years spent behind bars for the murder of his violent, alcoholic father, Elie Mestenapeo finds himself out in the world again, but alone. Banished for life from his community, Nutashkuan, he heads south to Montreal, where he becomes part of a new community—Cree, Nakota, Inuit, Innu, Mohawk and Atikamekw come together in Cabot Square. There, Elie meets Mary and Tracy, Inuuk twin sisters who take him under their wing; Jimmy, a Nakota man who hands out hot meals to those the city has forgotten; and Mafia Doc, an aging, self-proclaimed nurse who refuses to abandon his tent even as winter’s brutal cold descends.

In this deeply compassionate novel, Michel Jean gives voice to those living on society’s margins. With tenderness and unflinching honesty, he reveals lives scarred by violence and addiction but also sustained by resilience, kinship, and the faint, persistent light of hope.

In the spirit of Emma Donoghue’s international bestseller Room, Captive throws readers into the mind of a woman who wakes to find herself in a terrifying and surreal situation: she’s confined to a small grey room and she has no idea why she’s there.

Emma has an unremarkable life, a mundane job, and very little contact with her family and friends. Night after night she drinks to forget until one evening she’s jolted out of her routine. She wakes up in a concrete room furnished with only a mattress and a ceiling lamp. Emma is seized by terror. She feels real emotion for the first time in a long time. She tries to make sense of what is happening to her, where she is, who has taken her, and why. As the days, weeks, and possibly months pass she develops a routine that helps her survive her circumstances. But just as Emma begins to find comfort in her routine she receives another terrifying jolt and she must adapt to new circumstances. Her mysterious captors subject her to various tests that push her to her limit and make her question everything about herself, including her will to survive.

Captive is a harrowing, suspenseful, and hypnotic debut about honesty and freedom and the importance of living meaningfully and truthfully.

From internationally acclaimed playwright and author Robert Lepage comes 887 — an autobiographical story originally toured as a solo show. Framed by Lepage’s attempt to memorize Michèle Lalonde’s poem “Speak White,” 887 is an exploration of memory, culture, and community in Quebec.

As the 40th anniversary of La Nuit de la poésie in Montreal approaches, playwright Robert Lepage is invited to recite Michèle Lalonde’s seminal poem “Speak White” from memory on the special night. After agonizing hours spent attempting to memorize the piece, Lepage finds himself unable to recall a single line. In a last effort he decides to employ a mnemonic device dating back to ancient Greece called the Memory Palace — a technique of imagination and association. Lepage’s Memory Palace is 887 Murray Avenue, the apartment block where he grew up. Winding his way around the rooms of the building and the lives of the tenants therein, Lepage guides the reader through a world of recollections of 1960s Quebec, the decade that shaped the province’s cultural and political consciousness.

A mesmerizing and multifaceted glimpse into the realm of memory, 887 is a tour of culture and community in 1960s Quebec through one masterful artist’s remarkable, boundary-defying perspective.

A bracing and vividly told story set against the backdrops of the Tunisian Bread Riots in 1984 and the Jasmine Revolution in 2010, Hope Has Two Daughters offers a glimpse inside revolution from the perspectives of a mother and daughter.

Unwilling to endure a culture of silence and submission, and disowned by her family, Nadia leaves her native Tunisia in 1984 amidst deadly violence, chaos, and rioting brought on by rising food costs, eventually emigrating to Canada to begin her life.

More than twenty-five years later, Nadia’s daughter Lila reluctantly travels to Tunisia to learn about her mother’s birth country. While she’s there, she connects with Nadia’s childhood friends, Neila and Mounir. She uncovers agonizing truths about her mother’s life as a teenager and imagines what it might have been like to grow up in fear of political instability and social unrest. As she is making these discoveries, protests over poor economic conditions and lack of political freedom are increasing, and soon, Lila finds herself in the midst of another revolution — one that will inflame the country and change the Arab world, and her, forever.

Weaving together the voices of two women at two pivotal moments in history, the Tunisian Bread Riots in 1984 and the Jasmine Revolution in 2010, Hope Has Two Daughters is a vivid story that perfectly captures life inside revolution.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” meets Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in Daniel Grenier’s epic novel, which tells the story of a boy who ages only one out of every four years.

There’s something extraordinary about Thomas Langlois.

Thomas is a young boy growing up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, with a French-Canadian father, Albert, and an American mother, Laura. But beyond the fact that he lives between two cultures and languages, there’s something else about Thomas that sets him apart: he was born on February 29.

Before Albert goes on a strange quest to find out more about their mysterious relative, Aimé Bolduc, he explains to Thomas that he will only age one year out of every four and he will outlive all of his loved ones.

Thomas’s loneliness grows and the years pass until a terrible accident involving a young girl sets in motion a series of events that link the young girl and Thomas to Aimé Bolduc — a Civil War–era soldier and perhaps their contemporary.

Spanning three centuries and set against the backdrop of the Appalachians from Quebec to Tennessee, The Longest Year is a magical and poignant story about family history, fateful dates, fragile destinies, and lives brutally ended and mysteriously extended.

Bestselling author of Autopsy of a Boring Wife Marie-Renée Lavoie is a master of making us fall in love with her characters. She does it again with the tender coming-of-age story Some Maintenance Required.

It is 1993, the last year of school and Laurie’s final spring before adulthood. She works part time at a restaurant and looks after Cindy, her neglected, potty-mouthed little neighbour. Like her mother, Laurie devours books and dreams big. Her father works at a garage, where Laurie constantly struggles to keep her car running. It is here that a budding romance intensifies Laurie’s understanding of class differences, and opens her eyes to a more complicated world. With her big heart, she takes Cindy globe-trotting without even leaving town, and learns how to come to terms with circumstances beyond her control. Life teaches Laurie that everyone requires some maintenance sometimes. A story of taking responsibility and coming into adulthood, Some Maintenance Required is as funny and as impressive as its main character.

Finalist, Governor General's Literary Award in the Translation Category
Longlist, 2025 Dublin Literary Award

A Quebec bestseller based on the life of Michel Jean’s great-grandmother that delivers an empathetic portrait of drastic change in an Innu community.

Kukum recounts the story of Almanda Siméon, an orphan raised by her aunt and uncle, who falls in love with a young Innu man despite their cultural differences and goes on to share her life with the Pekuakami Innu community. They accept her as one of their own: Almanda learns their language, how to live a nomadic existence, and begins to break down the barriers imposed on Indigenous women. Unfolding over the course of a century, the novel details the end of traditional ways of life for the Innu, as Almanda and her family face the loss of their land and confinement to reserves, and the enduring violence of residential schools. 

Kukum intimately expresses the importance of Innu ancestral values and the need for freedom nomadic peoples feel to this day.

What anxiety grips Petites Cendres as he runs towards the sea in the sunshine on a warm tropical morning? Shouldn’t he be reassured by the thought that he now lives at the Acacia Gardens, a comfortable home where all find care, understanding, and healing? How can Fleur, the young musical prodigy, listen to the diabolical confessions of Wrath, the fugitive priest, without shuddering? And, can Daniel the writer finish his novel, the one he has been working on for twenty years, despite his sensitivity and empathy for all creatures, even if they are the most humble, like the lizard he inadvertently crushed under his sandal?

With this latest novel, Marie-Claire Blais once again gives us a vibrant portrait that embraces the span of life — from birth to death and beyond. Her characters question their purpose and what will come after, as they are confronted by evil that lives and that has taken root.

The latest work in internationally acclaimed author Marie-Claire Blais’s masterful novel cycle, A Twilight Celebration examines the prophetic side of the writer and the burden that falls to him in a world whose fate is yet to be determined.

Daniel, a middle-aged novelist and loving father alienated from one of his sons and unsure how to care for his daughter, is on his way to an international conference of writers. The gathering is to be held in the forest above a mountain village of a strangely dreamlike nature. In the twilight of the festival’s setting, dreams, memories, nightmares, and dark forebodings meld in Daniel’s unsettled but deeply sympathetic consciousness: He is haunted by pressing existential questions: What is to be done? What are his responsibilities as a father, as a friend — and as a writer? As Daniel confronts his own vanities, as he recalls the activism but also the disappointments and betrayals of friends and colleagues — as he contends with, above all, the fears and aspirations of his children in times marred by apocalypse, he asks, ultimately, what can be done?

In what may well be the most beautiful and disturbing of her novels, Marie-Claire Blais leads us on a heady, spellbinding journey through an interconnected world in which the artist strives to divert humankind’s headlong rush towards a terrible destiny. Here is a world in which friends and strangers, the living, the dead and those not yet born, are inextricably bonded by their often flawed but always splendid humanity. Yet again, Blais captivates with her urgent concerns, irrepressible empathy, and singular idiom: A Twilight Celebration is an astonishing literary accomplishment.

Like a Québécois Bridget Jones’s Diary, Autopsy of a Boring Wife tells the hysterically funny and ultimately touching tale of forty-eight-year-old Diane, a woman whose husband is having an affair because, he says, she bores him.

Diane takes the change to heart and undertakes an often ribald, highly entertaining journey to restore trust in herself--and others--that offers an astute commentary on women and girls, gender differences, and the curious institution of twenty-first century marriage. All the details are up for scrutiny in this brisk, yet tender story of a path to recovery. Autopsy of a Boring Wife is a wonderfully fresh novel of the pitfalls of an apparently “boring” life that could be any of ours.

THE POEMS

You fell asleep on the tiles,
a translucent peacock loomed,
your sex opened and let out
a very blue, very high flame.

You wore a split veil, that morning.

Silent, nailed to her chair, the seated woman writes. She cracks. The poems fidget, slip their fingers: they seek to enter. Perched on her shoulder, the poems whisper in her ear. She captures their messages: “I love the sacred contortions you offer me.” The poems protest: “You're squeezing us too hard: careful, pet.”

More than descriptors, the words behave as commands or moves in a game—and the voice of the seated woman rises to play.

A genre-bending speculative look at a dark future, Valid shares the story of one trans woman leading a revolution.

This is a mutiny.

If our mutiny is to succeed, I must name things well, without diversion. Lacking this, you will not deviate from your certainties.

Here it is: I am trans.

As in transgression. I have broken genres. I have removed myself from the rules. 

I am trans.

As in translation. I have dragged the elements that make up my person from one state to another. My geometry is variable.

And tonight, I am a revolution.

/warning: code red… fetch-query protocol enabled… transmission failed… standby/

Set in a disturbingly transfigured Montreal in the year 2050, Valid is a monologue delivered over the span of eight hours by Christelle, a seventy-year-old trans woman forced to live as a man in order to survive. Speaking to her captor, an ever–more powerful AI, she turns the tables and mounts her own revolution by showing her truest self. Part autofiction, part dystopic speculation on an all-too-possible future characterized by corporate power, ecological collapse, and political havoc, Valid is an ambitious work that is as much philosophical as it is confessional.

For Sure is among other things a labyrinth, a maze, an exploration of the folly of numbers, a repository, a defense and an illustration of the Chiac language. Written in dazzling prose — which is occasionally interrupted by surprising bits of information, biography, and definitions that appear on the page — Daigle perfectly captures the essence of a place and offers us a reflection on minority cultures and their obsession with language.

It is also the continuing story of Terry and Carmen, familiar to us from previous works, their children Etienne and Marianne, and all those who gravitate around the Babar, the local bar in Moncton — the Zablonskis, Zed, Pomme — artists and ordinary people who question their place in the world from a distinct point of view that is informed by their geography, and by their history, politics, and culture.

Masterfully translated from French by award-winning translator Robert Majzels, For Sure is the moving story of a family and a surprising, staggeringly original work that represents a corner of our country.

Finalist, Writers Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers

I have just heard for the first time the expression “to make soup”: it means to mix the bottom-of-the-pocket drugs of everyone huddled in the club toilet stall, opened MD, ketamine, old dry speed, crushed e pills, to make big lines that will let us forget the past forty-eight hours that have been so difficult.

In Instagram-style vignettes that span Montreal, New York, and Berlin, our narrator — a doctoral student in medieval studies — leads us through the bathrooms and back rooms of clubs and raves as he explores the sex, drugs, and music that define queer nightlife.

Accompanied by Jacob Pyne’s full-colour illustrations, which perfectly punctuate the narrator’s occasional self-destructive melancholy, Scenes from the Underground delivers the fully uninhibited field notes of the club scene.

In the tenth and final instalment of the legendary Soifs cycle, Marie-Claire Blais invites all the agonies and joys of humanity to a party by the sea.

For her eighteenth birthday, Mai hosts a party on the unnamed island where her family lives, on the edge of the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. But Mai's guests are not the only ones in attendance; Marie-Claire Blais has invited all of humanity here to consider what it means to be alive in this moment.

With the completion of the Soifs cycle, its architecture is revealed: Daniel, Mai's father and a writer; the children of Bahama Street who sing in Pastor Jeremy’s church; the wealthy artists and famous poets; the refugees and ex-cons; the trans performers of the Porte du Baiser Saloon. From this core, vast circles emerge, examining in one breath the horrors of fascist regimes and the beauty of queer nightlife, embracing the America of mass shooters and the struggles for civil rights, and laying bare the tragedies that shook the 20th century and laid the foundation for the years to come.

Poetic and meditative, with language that rolls and crashes like the ocean itself, Together by the Sea sings with the complexity of all beings, good and evil, past and present, here and elsewhere, connecting us all in the same unique, pitiful, and grandiose humanity.

In the latest installment in her award-winning series, Marie-Claire Blais reintroduces us to Petites Cendres, familiar from other books in the cycle, and lets us into the lives of two other unforgettable characters. She shows us, once again, how creativity and hope and suffering and exclusion intersect.

There is the writer who is stranded in an airport of the South Island, he is held captive because of a delayed flight. And a teenage musician, a former child prodigy living on the streets with his dog, wonders where he will get his next meal. Then there is Petites Cendres, who no longer dances or sings and refuses to get out of bed to attend the coronation of the new Queen of Night.

By superimposing these three worlds, Blais continues her ambitious, compelling exploration of life in contemporary North America

In Scotiabank Giller Prize–longlisted author Andrée A. Michaud’s genre-defying, ethereal mystery, a writer encounters her double and must grapple with an undetermined crime — and her own identity.

In the dubious sanctuary of a wintry forest, a writer encounters a woman who she suspects may be her double. So begins a journey of inquiry in which nothing, not even the author’s own identity, is certain. Who is Heather Thorne? Is she a stranger dangerously out of place in the woods, the victim of an accident or of a crime? Who is the author? Is her own name not in fact Heather Thorne?

Brimming with the snowy menace and mystery of the boreal woods, where nothing is ever entirely known, the celebrated and prize-winning Quebec noir novelist Andrée A. Michaud once again defies categorization in an ethereal story that is also a meditation on the very process of literary creation.

A bold and innovative novel, I Am Ariel Sharon dives into the tortured mind of the controversial Israeli prime minister as he lies comatose and faces an ultimate reckoning.

Award-winning Palestinian Canadian novelist Yara El-Ghadban imagines the confrontation at death’s door between Ariel Sharon, the “King of Israel,” and the women closest to him — his mother, his wives, and the mysterious nurse Rita. Like latter-day Greek furies, they lament the brutality of his life and maltreatment of the Palestinian people and demand he face up to his part in the bloodshed of Israel’s wars.

Here is an extraordinary, magical, and impassioned story of nearly impossible empathy, the singular work of a novelist in full flight.

Disturbing and sensuous, Audrée Wilhelmy’s tale of a hermetic family minding a lighthouse in willed isolation is reminiscent of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

The Body of Beasts is a startling, gorgeously written novel that tells the story of the Borya family living in isolation. Their lives are altered when young Osip, peering from the lighthouse gallery sees a woman, Noé, arrive — her dress scant, her skin curiously scarred, and her manner mysterious and wild.

Noé bears a child, Mie, to the eldest son on whose hunter-gathering the Borya family depends. She lives in a cabin on her own and covers the walls with drawings that allude to her mysterious life. The family’s entrenchment in nature is enthrallingly conveyed in young Mie’s sensuous ability to borrow at will the body of mammals, birds, fish, and insects. Her shape-shifting allows her to know the ways of the natural world, though only to a point. When her own awakening body starts to intrigue her, she asks her uncle Osip to “teach me human sex.”

The Body of the Beasts is an imaginative tour de force, a beautifully described portrait of a world that exists outside of words; an uninhibited and erotic novel that, in the singular tradition of Québécois Boreal Gothic, explores our humanity — and animal nature.

August 1979: twelve-year-old Michael Saint-Pierre disappears in the woods near Rivière-aux-Trembles when he and his friend Marnie Duchamp encounter a sudden storm. After an extensive search, only a muddy sneaker is found.

Thirty years later, in a neighboring town, little Billie Richard, who is about to celebrate her ninth birthday, fails to return home after school. Again, it's as if she's vanished into thin air.

Just like Marnie, who is haunted by the trauma of Michael's disappearance, Billie’s father is consumed by mourning and grief. As tehy come to terms with the inconceivable disappearances that have marked their lives, neither suspects that another tragedy will soon strike close to home...

An atmospheric mystery and a sharp exploration of guilt and sorrow, Trembling River is a powerful work from internationally renowned novelist Andrée A. Michaud and translated by J. C. Sutcliffe.

Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies meets Rachel Cusk’s The Lucky Ones in this astounding debut novel about a woman on the verge of infidelity.

Tessa is a thirty-seven-year-old real estate agent living in Montreal. She adores her husband and three young sons, but she’s deeply unhappy and questioning the set of choices that have led to her present life.

After a surprising run-in with Francis, her ex-boyfriend and first love, Tessa arranges to see him. During the three days before their meeting, she goes about her daily life — there’s swimming lessons, science projects, and dirty dishes. As the day of her meeting with Francis draws closer she has to decide if she is willing to disrupt her stable, loving family life for an uncertain future with him.

With startling clarity and emotional force, Fanny Britt gives us a complex portrait of a woman and a marriage from the inside out.

The eagerly anticipated sequel to the critically beloved and bestselling Autopsy of a Boring Wife finds the saucy and ever-appealing Diane, now turning fifty and with the wreckage of her marriage behind her, setting off on a new hilarious journey for romance.

A Boring Wife Settles the Score marks the return of Diane, the raunchy and entertaining heroine of the prize-winning and bestselling Autopsy of a Boring Wife. Despite the end of her marriage, Diane still has plenty of love to give. Determined not to waste her days — that’s just not her style — she finds a job in a daycare and solace in cocktails with her best friend, Claudine, who convinces Diane her love life is not over. Diane wants romance and sees no reason why she shouldn’t have it, but she soon discovers, in her typically chaotic and hilarious manner, that for a woman approaching her fifties the task is not so simple as it is for a man.

White Resin is an ethereal love story of the almost-impossible reconciliation between the manufactured world and the haunting and feminine nature that envelops it.  

In this impassioned and wildly imagined story of creation, a girl named Dãa, is born to “twenty-four mothers,” the sisters of a convent at the edge of the Quebec taiga. Nearby, at the Kohle mining company, a woman dies giving birth to Laure, a child with albinism, in the workers’ canteen. What follows is a dream-like recounting of their love affair and the family they bear, a captivating magic-realist tale of origins and opposites, that would be fantastical if it did not ring so true to the boreal north. White Resin is at once a dream-like romance and an homage to gorgeous, feral, and fecund nature as it both stands against and entwined with the industrial world.

Jerome Lupien — libidinous, unscrupulous, and fresh out of university — is ambitious and at loose ends. Whether on a hunting trip in the woods, on an escape planned in good faith to Cuba, or seeking to make his way in Montreal, Jerome cannot help but be embroiled in misadventures and underworld escapades. He is conned by the devious — a hunting guide, a low-life car salesman, and, ultimately, a well-to-do political lobbyist profiting from the city’s infamously corrupt partnership of politicians wielding remunerative contracts and the construction firms in cahoots. The unwitting (though frequently culpable) young man is enrolled, whether he knows it or not, in an unconventional and criminal school. And the education is singular, not only for Jerome, but also the reader.

The young man’s heady journey provides — as only Yves Beauchemin can do — an extraordinary, full, and trenchant portrait of class variety. Here is a mordant piece of social satire that is a marvelous entertainment and wonderfully traditional narrative too.

Winner, Robert-Cliche First Novel Award
Finalist, Governor General's Award for French-language Fiction

Dreaming is a luxury that few can afford. And yet, however inadvisedly, Iman dreams.

In an unnamed African country devoured by rampant urbanization and haunted by the mirages of Western prosperity, where for a few CFA francs a child can be bought and sold into slavery, Toumani's earliest education is in the tolerance of suffering. He endures one master then the next, holding his survival—his very self—with open hands.

For Iman, a black and white biracial boy with an elusive presence, the only viable option appears to be an escape to bountiful Europe, where everything must be easier. Obsessed with this idyllic elsewhere to the point of losing himself completely, he remains, for those close to him, an object of fascination difficult to define.

When Iman reaches out his hand to rescue Toumani from certain death, he sets in motion a friendship that may satisfy their need for connection but cannot fundamentally change their circumstances. What is the point of survival without hope for a more livable future? And what happens to them when they both love the same girl?

In this stunning translation of Ryad Assani-Razaki's award-winning debut novel, dreaming is a luxury that few can afford. And yet, however inadvisedly, Iman dreams.

From internationally acclaimed crime writer Andrée A. Michaud, a brilliant and original tragicomic thriller about one man’s search for peace and sanctuary amid invasive neighbours and a mysterious death.

Retired fifty-something Robert Moreau flees a society he can no longer bear for Mirror Lake, Maine. Little does he suspect that an intrusive neighbour and a mysterious death will quickly dispel any illusions he may have had about finding sanctuary in isolation. The misanthropic Moreau quickly learns that his Thoreau-like vision is a fiction. And as in all fiction, nothing, not even Moreau’s own identity, is certain — except, perhaps, the friendship of his loyal dog, Jeff.

In this tragicomic novel of the confusion between the fabular and the real, brilliantly rooted in the forested Quebec-Maine landscape, Moreau is compelled to look deep in Mirror Lake’s shimmering waters and into the eyes of the man he is, was, and could be. Winner of the Prix Ringuet and adapted into a feature film, Mirror Lake is a masterpiece of Michaud’s canon, a playfully genre-mixing psycho-thriller that explores our mysterious existence and the bottomless self.

The latest from Governor General’s Literary Award winner Perrine Leblanc is a mesmerizing story about the disappearance of three young women and a deeply disturbing portrait of a small town gone bad.

In between the mountains and the sea, on the north shore of the Baie des Chaleurs, there’s a village called Malabourg. The village is surrounded by all the usual features of the region: a river with wild salmon, a stretch of the national highway, and a coniferous forest. But Malabourg has one unusual feature: in the heart of the forest there’s a lake the kids call “the tomb.” It’s the place where three young women have disappeared, one by one. As rumours and allegations spread through the village, Alexis and Mina struggle to make sense of the tragedies before deciding the only way to forget is to leave. Alexis relocates to France to learn how to compose perfume and Mina moves hundreds of kilometres away from the sea. But, in spite of the distance, Alexis and Mina can’t forget Malabourg, or each other.

Unfolding along the beautiful, rugged landscape of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, The Lake is the gripping story of the disappearance of three young women, the unsettling aftermath, and the search for life beyond the limits of a small town.

The ninth novel in internationally acclaimed author Marie-Claire Blais’s extraordinary Soifs cycle, Songs for Angel is an impassioned interrogation of violence and hate that takes us into the soul of a white supremacist on the verge of a racist attack.

In the penultimate installment of the magnificent and ambitious Soifs cycle, widely regarded as one of the most original and ambitious endeavors ever to be undertaken in contemporary literature, renowned novelist Marie-Claire Blais once again marries the highest artistic standards with the most pressing human and political concerns. Revisiting figures from the previous novels in a swirling fresco of more than a hundred characters, Blais also takes us into the soul of “the Young Man,” a white supremacist preparing to attack a Black church and murder its entire congregation. This is an extraordinary portrait of the times that jostles and discomboluates the reader while inviting us to see the world in all its injustice and distress, but also its promise and beauty. Songs for Angel reminds us that Blais is a writer who never ceases to situate us in the world and the roles we play in it, and that reading her is always an unforgettable human experience.

The water slurps my shoulders, torso, and back in a big, wet kiss, bending my image into an ironic clone of the truth. I bow to its dominance and let it break me open. The water alone will have me.

Watched obsessively by her guru-like coach, a nameless swimmer battles the element of water in a gruelling physical regimen. Outside of training, she floats loose in waters murky, salty, and chlorinated, engaging in aimless self-destruction, restraint looming just beyond her drifting hand. Incrementally, swimming is killing her; the pool is killing her. Hovering always nearby is a prickly vulture, waiting to feed on the swimmer’s remains …

Intense and immersive, Kiss the Undertow is a psychologically gripping account of endurance pushed to extremes.