5 book recommendations for your cozy reading session

By: Les libraires editorial staff

In collaboration with Les Libraires and Loto-Québec, we suggest 5 books from the Fall 2022 literary season to accompany your cozy moments.

1 - MÉLASSE DE FANTAISIE / Francis Ouellet (La Mèche)

Offering us a true immersion in 1970s Montreal, this debut novelist, who was twice winner of the Radio-Canada Short Story Prize, presents, in a completely fluid and confident language, all that consumes the Faubourg à m’lasse. We follow an unusual narrator who, alongside Frigo, the gentle local "robineux" (alcoholic), revisits the corners, sometimes made of gravel, sometimes of smiles, of his memory. Expect humor and good nature in a style as colorful as it is unrestrained.

2 - J’ÉTAIS UN HÉROS / Sophie Bienvenu (Cheval d’août) 

In the vernacular language she masters perfectly, Sophie Bienvenu returns with a moving new novel, the story of a man who receives a diagnosis that confronts him with death. He, who was once a hero father, a healer of boo-boos, a race car driver in his daughter Gabrielle's eyes, how could he have messed everything up and preferred the bottle to her? At least, with the stray cat he carries on his shoulder, he thinks he hasn't done too badly. Who knows, maybe it's not too late to pick up his life where he left it, after all?

3 - STREGA / Johanne Lykke Holm, translated by Catherine Renaud (La Peuplade)

Imagine: a luxury hotel (or is it a convent?) in high mountains, in a dense forest bordered by a dark lake, nine 19-year-old women sent there to learn the rudiments of their lives as… women. When one of them disappears, anger rumbles. The cinematic writing, which partakes of dreaminess and unsettling strangeness, quickly plunges us into this sorority and into the luxurious, indolent, bewitching, and obsessive atmosphere of these places unlike any other.

4 - MONSIEUR HÄMMERLI / Richard Ste-Marie (Alire)

For this new novel, Richard Ste-Marie – who this time forsakes Detective Sergeant Francis Pagliaro – humorously portrays an atypical character. A music-loving hitman questions his career when he is offered a strange contract: he must kill a famous opera singer and the person who hires him for this mission is the singer herself! Every evening, these two listen to music together. And if they manage to stay awake, it’s that morning that the killer must act. Night after night, the diva continues to fall asleep at some point, thus prolonging his mission.

5 - LA FIN DU COMMENCEMENT / Fadi Malek and Anne Villeneuve (Nouvelle adresse)

Fadi is born in Lebanon in 1970. As a teenager, he lives under incessant bombings. However, it is not the war that terrifies him. On a second, more intimate front, he struggles to hide his homosexuality, for fear of disappointing his family, who have high hopes for him. As an adult, the young architect, fresh out of university, for whom no girlfriend is known, leaves his country for Montreal, a distant land he knows nothing about, in order to become what he desires most: Fadi. The end of the beginning is a superb story about identity construction, which gently teaches us that there is no true exile as long as one finds a welcoming land within oneself.