Kathy Dobson

People don’t leave the Point, even if they move far away. Or at least that’s how it seems to journalist Kathy Dobson. Growing up in the 1970s in Point St. Charles, an industrial slum in Montreal, she sees how people get trapped in the neighbourhood. In this sequel to the highly praised, With a Closed Fist, Dobson shares her journey of trying to escape from what was once described as the toughest neighbourhood in Canada. Kathy and her five sisters, raised by their single mother, deal with slum landlords, “pervy uncles,” and their father—a mostly absent police officer who does occasional work on the side for the local mob. As Kathy grows up and starts attending college outside the Point, she has to learn how to survive in a new environment where problems aren’t solved by a good punch to the head.

Laura Ritland

East and West, Laura Ritland’s astonishing debut, is a book of visions. These are roving poems drawn to defamiliarizing points of view, and are exquisitely attentive to the way the world exceeds our senses (“Cloud deduced cloud / after cloud and cloud.”) Beckoningly tender, lucid and intelligent, elegaic without being maudlin, East and West explores what Ritland calls the “middle ground” of childhood, family, diaspora, and migration, and how new cultural ideas can disrupt traditional perspectives. “My bedroom window an escape hatch / to endless sights of coastal stars.” Ritland takes the measure of herself—“I’m an integer of my own society”—in one of the most distinctive and beautifully turned styles in Canadian poetry.

Éric Plamondon

Writer Richard Brautigan was a counter-cultural icon of the 1960s. In Mayonnaise, the second novel of Éric Plamondon's 1984 Trilogy, narrator Gabriel Rivages pieces together Brautigan's life starting in Oregon, where he was born, to San Francisco, where he became a poet and satirical novelist, and on to Bolinas, California, where he committed suicide in 1984. Sifting through the ruins of Sixties idealism, Plamondon recasts the American western frontier into a surreal, timeless place of industrial invention, Hollywood glamour and acid-washed hedonism. Originally published in French, Mayonnaise was a finalist for the Grand Prix du livre de Montreal.

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.