The post Other Endings appeared first on Read Quebec.

The post Family Secrets: A Daughter’s Search for Her Parents’ Hidden War appeared first on Read Quebec.

Take a culinary journey through Montreal with award-winning chef, author, and food critic Lesley Chesterman.

Start your day with irresistible breakfast and brunch options like Bostok, a French bakery classic where almond croissants meet French Toast. Tour the city’s vibrant market culture and follow Chesterman through traditions like apéro hour and après-ski. You’ll discover the ins and outs of entertaining Montreal-style, with multicultural offerings that reflect the city’s vibrant spirit and classic Quebecois dishes that are both accessible and irresistible.

Through luscious photos, witty notes, and over 90 soulful and easy-to-follow recipes, Chesterman explores Montreal’s unique influence on her life as one of Quebec’s most beloved chefs and restaurant critics, all with the spirit of a friend chatting across the kitchen table.

With an added list of her own personal city favorites—from bistros and wine bars to bakeries and cheesemongers—A Montreal Cook is both deeply personal and warmly welcoming, transporting readers and home cooks directly to the unique city of Montreal and its unforgettable cuisine.

The post A Montreal Cook : Recipes and Reflections from My Kitchen appeared first on Read Quebec.

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands puts Beaton’s natural cartooning prowess on display. Colossal machinery and mammoth vehicles are set against a sublime Albertan backdrop of wildlife, Northern Lights, and Rocky Mountains. But as one of the few women among thousands of men working for the world’s largest oil companies, the culture shock is palpable. It does not hit home until she moves to a spartan, isolated worksite for higher pay. Katie encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet never discussed. For young Katie, her wounds may never heal.

Her first full length graphic narrative, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is the first graphic novel to win Canada Reads, and was named Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker, Time, NPR, The Chicago Tribune, and The Washington Post. One of Publishers Weekly’s Top 10 Books of the year, it was also named among the Best Graphic Novels of the Year by Forbes, The Globe and Mail and The Guardian.

The post Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands appeared first on Read Quebec.

As she emerges back into the world, she must relearn how to move, think, feel, and live in a changed body and mind. In this memoir, Alyssa chronicles the frustrating, absurd, uncanny process of re-entering her life as someone not quite the same as before.

The post Trying Unfathomably Hard to Live: Notes on the First Year of a Stroke appeared first on Read Quebec.

After being tracked by wolves and left behind in the forest as a child, after sleeping through a flame-spilling chimney fire, after regularly riding in vehicles driven by adults under the influence, and after physically fighting off one of her mother’s abusive partners, author Michelle Willms is both surprised and grateful she survived her northern childhood. Following the sudden death of her mother in 2001, Willms began writing about her and her family’s history to better understand how tragedy and the breakdown of trust impacted multiple generations, and to find healing.

Brave, engaging and electric, Northern Girls is a collection of true stories about the fractured legacy of growing up in rural northern Ontario. Exploring themes of generational trauma, parental addictions, and domestic violence, Willms confronts a past replete with both fragility and resilience.

Michelle Willms holds a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and a Bachelor of Social Work from McMaster University, and a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of British Columbia. Her writing has appeared in multiple literary journals, as well as the anthology This Side of the Divide: Stories of the American West (Baobab Press). She is the 2021/2022 recipient of the Norman L. Rothstein Memorial Scholarship, awarded by the Smith Family Foundation on the recommendation of the Department of Creative Writing. Michelle and her family live in Southern Ontario, Canada, as settlers on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabeg, Ojibway/Chippewa, and Haudenosaunee peoples.

The post Northern Girls: True Stories appeared first on Read Quebec.

Families, on the other hand…

The 1970s were a tumultuous time to be growing up in Montreal, with the rise of the Quebec independence movement, the coming to power of the Parti Québécois, many Montrealers migrating to Toronto, the 1976 Olympics. Disco, free love, and counter-culture revolutions combined with more women entering the workforce and easier access to divorce. Oren Safdie saw his parents break up and get back together again before parting ways for good, but Ken Dryden and the Montreal Canadiens remained steadfast in his life, lifting his and everyone else’s spirits by winning six Stanley Cups in nine years.

The post Beyond Ken Dryden appeared first on Read Quebec.

The post I Can’t Believe I’m Old: Essays on Aging appeared first on Read Quebec.

What is the past? How can we let it speak on its own terms, without forcing it into the categories of history? In The Third Solitude, Benjamin Libman gathers and weaves the threads of multiple pasts — of his community, of his family, and of himself — in an attempt to escape the inadequate narratives around Zionism that he grew up with, and to create nothing short of a new paradigm.

Across a series of interconnected memories, Libman leads us through the many fragments that make a life, unafraid to question deeply cherished beliefs about Jewish identity, and seeks to reconcile his own values with those inculcated in him. Along the way, he casts aside tired tropes and shores together the pieces of a new way of looking toward the future.

The Third Solitude is a paean to the art of losing, and to the visions of the past that persist in the present.

The post The Third Solitude appeared first on Read Quebec.

Their alternating narratives—raw, poetic, and unflinchingly honest—weave together moments of piercing beauty (the scent of jasmine in Gaza’s streets, the taste of warm knafeh from Abu Al-Soud) with the horror of drone strikes, forced displacement, and the systematic erasure of their home.

This is not just a book about war. It’s about what it means to love a place the world is trying to destroy.

The post Gaza Held in Time: A Tapestry of Two Lives appeared first on Read Quebec.