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

Linked portraits from the Afro-Canadian diaspora.

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.

Alan Hustak

Walking tours in Montreal's Old City.

Old Montreal, not far from the city centre, is a historic neighbourhood in transition alive with raw energy. A compact area where the city was founded in 1642, it is today packed with museums, churches, galleries, restaurants, boutiques, boutique hotels, and entertainment venues.

A tourist destination in any season, the ambiance of its squares and waterfront park is determinedly romantic. Whether you want to ride a giant ferris wheel, go skating in winter, view dazzling fireworks from an illuminated bridge in summer, or just explore its narrow cobblestone streets to soak up four centuries of history in Vieux-Montréal, this book is indispensable.

This walking tour pocket guide is a complete revision of the bestseller published for the city’s 375th anniversary, which was recommended by Report on Business as “the perfect guidebook.”

William Vallières

From Montreal's metro stations and streets to pastoral mise-en-scènes, William Vallières' first book, Versus, is a lyric bildungsroman filled with portraits of seduction and infatuation, loneliness and buried shame. "What yesterday had fought to bud / Is stunted under ice today." These are darkly canny poems about childhood, familial histories, lost love and the weariness of spending one's "being being / Everything I'm against." Deftly crafted, intense and compact, with barbed insights arrived at through verbal twists and syntactic half-turns, Vallières' voice is entirely his own.