Kenneth Orvis

‘God help us, Dent – the thing is, my daughter has become a dope fiend.’

Maxwell Dent studied law at McGill and served in the RCAF and Intelligence M-5 during the Korean War. For a private investigator, he’s as respectable as they come. No wonder then that it’s Dent Huntley Ashton summons to his Westmount mansion. A respected captain of industry, the wealthy man knows the PI can be relied upon to be discreet.

Ashton’s daughter Helen has fallen into heroin addiction, and the millionaire wants Dent to smash the ring supplying her vice, just as he took down a ring operating in Korea.

Set in 1954, the novel captures the dying days of Montreal’s reputation as one of the world’s great sin cities. The Damned and the Destroyed was published in 1962 by McClelland & Stewart in Canada and Dennis Dobson in the UK; this Ricochet Books edition marks the first print edition in more than five decades.

Kaie Kellough

Dominoes at the Crossroads maps an alternate Canada—one crisscrossed by a Caribbean diaspora seeking music, futures, and portals to their past.

In this collection of stories, Kaie Kellough’s characters navigate race, history, and coming-of-age by way of their confessions and dreams. Through the eyes of jazz musicians, hitchhikers, quiet suburbanites, student radicals, secret agents, historians, and their fugitive slave ancestors, Kellough guides us from the cobblestones of Montreal’s Old Port to the foliage of a South American rainforest, from a basement in wartime Paris to an underground antique shop in Montréal during the October Crisis, allowing the force of imagination to tip the balance of time like a line of dominoes.

An internationally acclaimed sound performer and writer, Kaie Kellough’s books include Accordéon, which was shortlisted for the 2017 Amazon Canada First Novel Award, and Magnetic Equator, shortlisted for the 2019 QWF A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. Born in Calgary, he currently lives in Montréal.

Rosalind Pepall

This is a collection of stories about art works--whether an oil portrait, a wilderness explorer's sketchbook or a Tiffany lamp--and how the author fell under their spell. Few people are aware of the work, the emotion, and the obsessions of a curator's job. Exhibitions come and go; they are forgotten after a few years, but they live on in the curator's memory.

In these fifteen essays we encounter artists falling in and out of love, family tragedies, the creation of the Stanley Cup, the secrets of Tiffany, Antiques Roadshow, a rootless baroness, the design craze for aluminum, small Japanese boxes called kogos, watercolour sketchbooks of the Canadian north, a beautiful prayer room in Montreal, gondolas flying through windows in Venice, and Moscovites who love Goldfinger.

Pepall’s stories sparkle with clarity and leave one with a sense that art is an amazing, worthwhile, occasionally mysterious human activity.

Archival black and white photographs and colour plates—including Edwin Holgate’s Ludivine, one of the most beloved and recognizable Canadian portraits ever painted—make this book a must-have for art lovers, students, academics, museum-goers and readers interested in the role art plays in the creation of our lives.

Éric Plamondon

In Apple S, the kaleidoscopic worldview of celebrated Québécois novelist Éric Plamondon sets its sights on Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and the seeds of Silicon Valley. Concluding a wide-lens journey through the American West that began with Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller (Hungary-Hollywood Express, 2016) and continued with counter-culture poet Richard Brautigan (Mayonnaise, 2018), the final installment of the 1984 trilogy delivers a heart-rending meta-biography of a technological mastermind. With Plamondon’s alter ego, Gabriel Rivages, using his Mac computer to dig deep into the internet’s detritus to reconstruct Jobs, the author devises the story of the personal computer with episodes from the lives of Alan Turing, Charles Babbage, Lord Byron, Albert Einstein, George Orwell, and numerous other figures who inflected the arc of one of the twentieth century’s most influential figures.