Avi Friedman

In Neighbourhood: Designing a Liveable Community, renowned architect, professor and urban planner Avi Friedman describes the planning of a new neighbourhood in Middlesex Centre, a rural municipality in southern Ontario. Friedman explores how good and bad design affect our homes and civic life. In his quest to build a new kind of neighbourhood, Friedman talks about personal architectural and community touchstones that have informed his work through the years.

Over the past decade or more, worrisome signs—climate change, depletion of natural resources, unrelenting urban sprawl, the tyranny of the automobile, the decline of face-to-face human contact—have motivated us to radically rethink home and community design. In Avi Friedman’s view, these issues have combined to force us to question fundamental practices and come up with better solutions.

Alan Hustak

For almost six decades Montreal’s fabled underground city has been an inspiration to civic planners from around the world. What began as a subterranean pedestrian network beneath Place Ville Marie is now an integral part of the city and a major tourist attraction. It has developed into a parallel metropolis, an amazing labyrinth of passageways, alleys, atriums, and hallways that snake their way along 40 km, connecting 85 downtown skyscrapers, ten hotels, 2000 stores apartment blocks and 68 Métro stations. Alan Hustak looks at its history, takes you on a personal tour of the multi-level environment, and reveals its many hidden surprises along the way.

Like the city above ground the underground city has its own mix of sun and shade, public squares, fountains, green spaces, and even an indoor skating rink. It is not so much an underground city—that’s a misnomer—as it is an enclosed, weather proof city: a climate-controlled environment, above and below ground that is air-conditioned in summer and warm against the blast of winter.

For Montrealers and visitors alike, Exploring Montreal’s Underground City is an indispensable guide with tours, maps, and indexes, and full colour photographs.

Sheila Kindellan-Sheehan

A new high-octane detective Tony Damiano thriller.

On a warm summer evening in June, cast members of the Thirties Show at Café Cleopatra make a gruesome discovery. Discarded like trash, the body of a young man lies crumpled on the roof of the legendary club situated in the former red light district of the city. A few hours later, in another part of the city, a man is gunned down in cold blood. What the victims have in common is a link to the Crémazie Division of Major Crimes. New acting chief Toni Damiano is devastated to learn that her partner may have intentionally corrupted evidence in the first-degree murder case at the Café. The chief sets up an operation that will either clear her partner or give her reason to arrest him. But she also fractures the trust and loyalty of a nine-year partnership. There is no pardon for betrayal, his or hers.

Fans of Kindellan-Sheehan’s previous thrillers—The Red Floor, The Courier Wore Shorts, and Where Bodies Fall, will not be disappointed as we follow and empathize with her ongoing cast of complex and compelling characters.

Jim Johnstone

An exploration of mental illness and addiction.

Praised for his darkly psychological accounts of extreme experiences, Jim Johnstone’s fifth book of poems explores his most difficult terrain to date: mental illness and addiction. Like Coleridge's opium dreams, Johnstone's narratives in The Chemical Life are hallucinatory, coloured by his use of both prescription and recreational drugs. Returning often to the notion of rival realities—“in everything, there is a second state”—Johnstone is brilliantly disruptive and disorientating; a poet whose savagely austere forms, electrically precise images and keyed-up rhythms reveal an obsession with the mind-altering properties of language itself.