New Essential Fiction from Book*hug
The Greats by Sylvain Prudhomme, Translated by Jessica Moore
$20
Sylvain Prudhomme’s The Greats, translated by award-winning wordsmith Jessica Moore, is a novel of mourning, love, and the thirst for justice that tells the story of a population who knew hope and independence but now live under the oppressive rule of an army dictatorship.
Winner of the 2015 Prix Littéraire de la Porte Dorée
Winner of the 2014 Prix Georges Brassens
Blood Fable by Oisín Curran
$20
“A family drama, a fantastical voyage, and a poetic reflection on love, death and betrayal, this extraordinary coming-of-age novel exposes the difficult relationship between free-thought and blind faith, evasion and enlightenment. Oisín Curran’s Blood Fable is an adventure for the heart and soul.” —Johanna Skibsrud, Scotiabank Giller Prize winning author of The Sentimentalists and Quartet for the End of Time
“Blood Fable is, for me, a perfect book; it is the novel I always wish I were reading. In its twin stories—one of an eleven-year-old boy and his flawed, beloved parents and the other a wild tale of love, peril, and adventure across underground tunnels and seas—are all the wonder and terror of childhood, refracted by a luminous imagination. Through the wide eyes of a child, Curran plumbs the world of adults with compassion and acuity. Blood Fable is a quest, a question, a story of searching—for understanding, insight, heroes—and of failing, finding in their stead the imaginative mercy of love. This is a joy of a novel, glittering, wondrous, and strange. I remain in its thrall.” —Rebecca Silver Slayter, author of In the Land of Birdfishes
Sports and Pastimes by Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard, Translated by Aimee Wall
$20
Translated by Aimee Wall, this fast-paced story follows the daily life, at once empty and overloaded, of a group of friends who spend all their energy trying to distract themselves with huge hits of endorphins, art and various substances, navigating pleasure and boredom, the extraordinary and the banal, as (more or less) worthy representatives of the best and worst of what their era has to offer. Consider a mashup of Girls and Less Than Zero and you are pretty close to the fun and games of Sports and Pastimes.
The Third Person by Emily Anglin
$20
“Reading this book is like walking into an apparently familiar room and having all the details add up to something unsettling and new.” —Kate Cayley, Trillium Book Award winning author of How You Were Born
“Prepare yourself for “spontaneous empathy”, and for specters, knowledge brokers, and an oddball cast of characters who feel, at once, both familiar and strange. Reading Emily Anglin’s The Third Person is like watching the opening sequence of Hitchcock’s Rear Window. —Johanna Skibsrud, Scotiabank Giller Prize winning author of The Sentimentalists and Quartet for the End of Time
