Redemption Ground
Lorna Goodison

In her first-ever collection of essays, poet and novelist Lorna Goodison interweaves the personal and political to explore themes that have occupied her working life: her love of poetry and the arts, colonialism and its legacy, racism and social justice, authenticity, and the enduring power of friendship. Taking its title from one of Kingston's oldest markets, Redemption Ground introduces us to a vivid cast of characters and remembers moments of epiphany—in a cinema in Jamaica, at New York's Bottom Line club, and as she searched for a Black hairdresser in Paris and drank tea in London's Marylebone High Street. Enlightening and entertaining, these essays explore not only daily challenges but also the compassion that enables us to rise above them. They confirm her as a major figure in world literature.

Black and Blue
Stanley Péan

In Black and Blue, author and radio personality Stanley Péan guides us through a history of jazz, stopping at a number of high points along the way. He takes us behind the scenes with anecdotes that tell much about the misunderstandings that have surrounded the music. How could Jean-Paul Sartre have mixed up Afro-Canadian songwriter Shelton Brooks with the Jewish-American belter Sophie Tucker? What is the real story behind the searing classic “Strange Fruit” made immortal by Billie Holiday, who at first balked at performing it? And since this is jazz, there is no shortage of sad ends: Bix Beiderbecke, Chet Baker, Lee Morgan, to name a few. Péan also shows how musicians like Miles Davis worked with the emerging voices of hip- hop to widen jazz’s audience, as well as how the movies, Hollywood and European cinema alike, tried to use jazz, often whitening it in the process. Like jazz itself, Péan’s essays are spontaneous, thoughtful, and refined.
Prophetess
Baharan Baniahmadi

An unflinching allegorical novel that explores trauma, women’s rights, and religious tradition.

In the slums of Tehran, seven-year-old Sara witnesses the horrific murder of her sister Setayesh, an event leaves her in shock and unable to speak. As the neighbourhood frantically searches for the missing girl, Sara is locked inside herself, unable to tell her parents or police all she knows.

Over time, the mute Sara develops a strange allergic reaction, in which hair covers her face every time a man approaches her. One day in school, when an imam gets too close, she faints. After Sara reawakens, classmates show her video of her speaking freely and eloquently while unconscious… in Polish. These are only the first of many unexpected developments in Sara’s life, as she grapples with how to live with her sister’s memory in a world that abuses women from a very early age.

Prophetess is a fearless novel of gripping and surreal turns that push the limits of the imagination in their collision of tradition and nonconformity. Baharan Baniahmadi has crafted a wild, allegorical interrogation of trauma, women’s rights, and religious tradition.

A House Without Spirits
David Homel

When Paul is hired to write a monograph of the Montreal photographer John Marchuk, he assumes he’ll be able to turn over the eccentric project in a matter of weeks. Little does he know that over the next few months his visits with Marchuk, in a house stuffed with boxes stacked floor to ceiling with his life’s archive, will expose an emptiness in his own home.

In A House Without Spirits, Homel delivers some of his most memorable characters to date—reclusive artists, disaffected life partners, wandering ghosts, cult-affiliated nuns—in a contemporary Montreal noir that reveals how much we learn about ourselves when we begin to ask questions of others.

Wolf Sonnets
R. P. LaRose

In his commanding poetry debut, Wolf Sonnets, R. P. LaRose undoes the sonnet's classical constraints, retooling the form for current political circumstances. Packed with family lore, these poems reflect on how deeply we can trust the terms we use to construct our identity. A proud citizen of the Métis Nation, LaRose even questions his right to identify as such: “I was made in someone else’s home,” he writes. Wolf Sonnets is verse obsessed with names, infinity, numbers, categories, and interconnectedness. Depicting his ancestors as wolves—symbols of survival and protection—LaRose bring fresh insight to his wider poetic project: castigating the inequality, greed, and racism inherent to colonialism.
Press

On Dandelion Daughter:
Three hundred pages of heartbreaking storytelling, right from the start.La Presse

On Wolf Sonnets:
"R.P. LaRose's fierce and fiercely beautiful sonnets whirl like cyclones of dream and memory, converging on questions of Indigenous land stewardship, romantic heartbreak, family history, and Métis identity. LaRose's clear-eyed, anticolonial sequence not only challenges the 'flags and flagellations / of yet another not-empire / that calls itself a republic,' but also tenderly attends to moments of metaphysical and spiritual intensity." — Michael Prior "Wolf Sonnets

On The Strangest Dream :


On Redemption Ground:

Praise for From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People

News

JANUARY NEWSLETTER (click for link)
We are thrilled to share the news that Dimitri Nasrallah's Hotline is a 2023 Canada Reads selection! His inspiring novel of perseverance will be championed by bhangra dancer, artist and educator Gurdeep Pandher during the great Canadian book debate held from March 27-30 on CBC TV, CBC Radio and CBC Books. Congratulations to all the finalists! Baharan Baniahmadi's allegorial novel Prophetess is the Toronto International Festival of Author's virtual book club selection for the March 8, 2023 session. Plus poetry readings: Kaie Kellough and Tawhida Tanya Evanson in Montreal and John Barton on Salt Spring Island!

DECEMBER NEWSLETTER (click for link)
Our Holiday Gift Guide is here! A short but sweet selection of Véhicule's bestsellers, award-winners, the ever-popular Montreal photo collection History Through Our Eyes and, for the vintage pulp fan, the latest Ricochet bundle! And if you're already looking ahead to spring, check out our Spring 2023 catalogue!

NOVEMBER NEWSLETTER (click for link)
Congratulations! Iranian-Canadian author and actor Baharan Baniahmadi's Prophetess won the 2022 Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction at the Quebec Writers' Federation Literary Awards! Tawhida Tanya Evanson won the 2022 Blue Metropolis/ Conseil des arts de Montréal New Contribution Literary Prize for her novel Book of Wings! Véhicule will be at the Salon du livre de Montrél at booth #725 with the AELAQ and participating in several events and panels. And the Fall 2022 Montreal Review of Books is online chock-full of reviews and features!

OCTOBER NEWSLETTER (click for link)
Launch into fall with us! Letters from Montreal on Oct. 13 at Bar le Ritz, Durable Goods and Wolf Sonnets at The Word on Oct. 15, Black and Blue at Librairie Résonance on Oct. 28, and a special Toronto fall gala event at the Monarch Tavern on Oct. 19!SEPTEMBER NEWSLETTER (click for link)
Hotline is nominated for the Giller Prize! David Homel's novel A House Without Spirits launches Sept 29! And Letters From Montreal is now available!
Discover

Click here to see Kaie Kellough read from his QWF Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Award winning book Dominoes at the Crossroads

Click here to listen to Rosalind Pepall's interview on CBC's All in a Weekend about Talking to a Portrait: Tales of an Art Curator.

In Periodicities’ fifth series of videos, Sadiqa de Meijer reads a few poems from her new book, The Outer Wards. Click here

Read “The Silence of A.M. Klein,” an incisive essay by our editor Carmine Starnino in the April issue of The New Criterion.



SODEC, Québec  Canada Council for the Arts Canadian Heritage
The Canada Council
Véhicule Press acknowledges the generous support of its publishing program from the Book Publishing Industry Development Program of the Department of Canadian Heritage, The Canada Council for the Arts, and the Société de développement des entreprises culturelles du Québec (SODEC).