Talonbooks: 174 books

Canada’s master playwright applies his trademark black humour and incredibly crisp dialogue to the family and multiculturalism. We the Family follows the ripple effects within two culturally and racially divergent families when their children wed.We the Family ’s list of characters reads like an...

Fred A. Reed’s fifth book on the Middle East and “the wars of the Ottoman succession” traces the roots of Islamic fundamentalism, as currently enacted by Hezbollah and other Islamic fundamentalist organizations, to the iconoclasts of sixth- and seventh-century Damascus.

From the award-winning author of stage hits Mambo Italiano and In Piazza San Domenico comes a delicious, saucy new comedy about Terry and Robert, a young couple with roots in the Italian neighbourhood of St. Leonard in Montreal. The couple’s newly renovated duplex has barely a hint of gilded rococo...

In 1999, writer Madeleine Gagnon undertook to document the experience of women in the many war zones at the end of a “century of ashes” through their own eyes and in their own words. Travelling to Macedonia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, Gagnon talked with women of all ages and social classes, recording her encounters.

When his father died, award-winning poet and curator Gil McElroy was given a box of photographs that documented his father’s military career. Beginning in the Second World War and continuing right through to the end of the Cold War, the senior McElroy staffed Canada’s network of electronic defence,...

In 1990, during Operation Desert Storm, a troubled Canadian soldier and a teenage Palestinian black-marketeer meet in the Qatari desert and become unlikely and secret friends. But the tenuous friendship is severed after a horrifying act inside the Canadian base.This play rips the mask off recent western...

Singularly obsessed with his all-consuming passion for Anna, the object of his adolescent desire, the photographer Christophe Langelier is beside himself. Ten years ago, he failed the test of eating a bicycle for her as proof of his love and devotion. Since then, he has created a photographic catalogue...

Three tales spin a web of suspense, impending violence and tragedy that haunt the sleek façade of a city.

After six generations, the family estate has been subdivided, the garden has gone wild, and the house has been carved into a duplex. The McKinnons now live on one side of the property, while the other has been sold to an immigrant family from Turkey. Both heirs apparent must learn, now, to build love in the wilderness of their lives.

Four seasons after her husband Tom’s disappearance, Colette remains emotionally paralyzed, isolated in a country cottage. She waits in anguish, not knowing whether he is dead or alive, but clinging to hope. A young stranger in a jean jacket waves to her from the frozen lake – a sign? She emerges...

It’s the spring of 1963. The young Quebec author Marie-Claire Blais, bursting with energy and talent, has just won a coveted Guggenheim fellowship. She chooses Cambridge, Massachusetts, as the place where she will begin her writer’s apprenticeship with her mentor, Edmund Wilson. American Notebooks...

It has been well known since Marius Barbeau’s review of the first edition of Franz Boas’s Tsimshian Mythology in 1917 that something was seriously amiss with Boas’s alleged “translations” of the stories gathered by his chief Tsimshian informant, Henry Tate. But what, exactly, was it that...

The year is 1967, and everyone in Montreal is waiting for the day when they can visit Expo’s exotic foreign pavilions. Meanwhile, Céline Poulin, self-conscious midget and former waitress, has started a new job: hostess in a bordello just opened by Montreal’s famous Madame, Fine Dumas. Its specialty? All the “girls” in “Le Boudoir” are transvestites. This is Céline’s record.

Amid a sea of dystopian world literatures haunted by the fractious claims of identity politics, Nuri Does Not Exist is an astonishingly charming collection of linked short stories that engages us with the utterly ­believable innocence of its Utopian vision. Accompany Nuri from Zanzibar to Canada...