Nerina, a young woman living in Venice after the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, is looking for a way to move to America.

It’s Montreal, 1953, and eight-year-old Ellen, an only child prone to daydreaming, and her mother, a woman who believes in the promise of fresh starts, have moved into a large house on the flanks of Mt. Royal. To make ends meet, Ellen’s mother takes in a group of refugees from Central Europe, whose erratic behaviour and dark view of human nature captivate the young girl’s...

“By the time I was five years old, I had spent half my life hidden away in a barn loft.” So begins a Jewish girl’s account of her childhood amid the ruins of World War II. The time is 1944, the setting a Polish town which has just been liberated from the Germans by the Red Army. While adults mourn what is lost forever, the narrator explores a world forbidden to her for so long, discovering the pleasures of the senses and the company of other children. An autobiographical novel by a writer from...

A crisp March morning in the Buttes-Chaumont park in Paris. Claire, waiting to meet her husband, Adrian, has more than a tourist’s passing interest in the place. She has come to France to be with Adrian while he researches a book on French gardens, but Claire’s real mission is to find out what happened to her mother, Dolly, during her last stay in Paris. A promising sculptor and ardent admirer of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Dolly suffered a mysterious decline following her return home from the City of Light. Now severe panic attacks are forcing Claire to abandon her own work as a photographer. Is she repeating her mother’s pattern? The answer, Claire believes, lies in the past. Claire retraces Dolly’s footsteps in Paris and in the nearby countryside, where Rousseau’s spirit is still discernable. Claire’s quest in France is filled with more than one startling discovery as she, Adrian, and their friends, navigate the tricky terrain of marriage, parenthood, friendship, and...

These six stories are about real people—Pierre Vallières, Paul Rose, the Mohawks, Paolo Violi, Claude Jutra, and Jean Castonguay. Each in turn exhibits an acute discomfort with the world as it is, a fierce resistance against the passivity and apathy that drags at life’s coat-tails, and an inclination—nourished by personal belief—to act in ways that threaten the orderly peaceable flow of what passes for normal life. For different reasons, these individuals who have reached that point of crisis where lives are lived in extremis: a time when perspectives narrow and existence is imperiled by shifting equations of power. Trapped between rage and despair, violence inevitably becomes the only possible...