The men in Madeleine Thien’s novel Dogs at the Perimeter (McClelland & Stewart) have a tendency to drift. Two younger brothers are lost in the wreckage of the Cambodian civil war; an old man disappears in his quest to find his sibling; a son is pushed away in a fit of regret. For Janie, a researcher living in Montreal, the city grows hazy with the ghosts of her childhood in Cambodia—a fog that thickens when her elderly friend and mentor, Hiroji, vanishes without a trace. Janie’s grief feels almost suffocating at times, but Thien’s luminous writing lights the way; “the words keep coming, accumulating like snow, like dust, a fragile cover that blows away so easily.”
—Madeline Coleman

In Dimitri Nasrallah’s Niko (Véhicule Press), a young boy from war-ravaged Lebanon navigates Montreal—a city of isolation and stifling rules—after being sent to Canada to escape the violence in his home country. Nasrallah’s tone shifts skilfully as his titular protagonist grows from a confused six-year-old to a young man in search of a job, weed, a lover and a solitary refuge from his over-bearing aunt and uncle. The novel takes a surreal turn when Niko’s estranged father emerges with no memory of his past; although such fairytale moments seem unbelievable, Nasrallah mostly circumvents rehashed, pedantic tales of immigration and childhood. His prose catapults the eager reader into Niko’s conflicted world.
—Caitlin Manicom

Clark Blaise has been billed as the greatest Canadian author you’ve never heard of, but in truth he’s something much more ordinary: an unremarkable writer. The stories in the aptly titled collection The Meager Tarmac (Biblioasis) are bare, grey landscapes of halting prose and non-dimensional characters. Even moments of potential levity—like a one-off affair between an Indo-American housewife and her Palestinian grocer—are stillborn and passionless on the page, and most of the stories suffer under exhausted stereotypes. Asian parents are hard on their children? If I wanted such depth of ethnic insight, I’d read Maclean’s.
—Drew Nelles

Set in Toronto during the Northeast blackout of 2003, Michael Murphy’s first novel, A Description of the Blazing World (Freehand), follows a man named Morgan Wells during his obsessive search for others who share his name. Meanwhile, a young boy fantasizes about his own death as he trawls the darkened city, looking for proof that the end of the world is near. Murphy navigates both storylines with tact and wit, plunging the reader into minds as dark as the unlit skyline until the two narratives collide, shining a light on the characters’ baffling compulsions.
—Mick Cote

Victorian-era Montreal’s transformation into a flourishing metropolis is given a face both human and empirical in Peopling the North American City (McGill-Queen’s University Press), which tracks la belle ville’s progress from the mid-nineteenth century to the turn of the twentieth. Sherry Olson and Patricia A. Thornton—professors at McGill and Concordia, respectively—do their best to temper an overwhelmingly methodical approach with compelling characters, narrative arcs and real drama. While much of the book might be a little dry to all but the most historically minded, the authors manage to unearth rich skeins of affect, especially when dissecting tensions between the French, Irish Catholic and Protestant communities.
—Alex Manley