The rise to power of one of Canada’s most progressive municipal movements in recent memory.

When it was dreamed up in the early 2000s by a transportation bureaucrat with a quixotic dream of bringing tramways back to the streets of Montreal, few expected Projet Montréal to go anywhere. But a decade and a half later, the party was a grassroots powerhouse with an ambitious agenda that had taken power at city hall—after dumping its founder, barely surviving a divisive leadership campaign and earning the ire of motorists across Quebec.

Projet Montréal aspired to transform Montreal into a green, human-scale city with few, if any equal in North America. Equal parts reportage, oral history and memoir, Saving the City chronicles what the party did right, where it failed, and where it’s headed. Written from the perspective of someone who worked for Projet Montréal’s administration for almost a decade, Daniel Sanger’s book draws on dozens of interviews with other actors in the party and on the municipal scene, past and present.

A highly readable history of Montreal municipal politics over the past 30 years, Saving the City will also discuss issues of interest to city-dwellers across Canada. Are political parties at the municipal level a good thing? Is Montreal’s borough system a model for other big cities? What are the best ways to control urban car use? What is the optimum width for a sidewalk? The best kind of street tree? And why free parking is a terrible idea.

A much-celebrated auto-fictional feminist memoir, finally available in English.

In this frank and unforgettable book, celebrated Québécois writer Alexie Morin becomes the subject of her own story as she places a childhood friendship under a microscope. An autobiographical novel set in a small industrial town in Quebec during the 1990s, Open Your Heart recounts the story of a difficult friendship between two girls brought together by illness and operations suffered at a young age. One girl suffers from severe strabismus, while the other was born blue. The first, defiant, feels that something is wrong with her, while the second is an angelic child loved by all. One becomes a writer, and the other dies at eighteen, during an operation that should have saved her life.

In this debut novel, Morin stakes out an exceptional pursuit for truth in these old memories as she grapples with death, love, bonding and solitude.

Lorna Goodison’s first poetry collection to be published in Canada in over nine years, Mother Muse heralds the return of a major voice. The poems in Goodison’s new book move boldly and range widely; here are praise songs alongside laments; autobiography shares pages with the collective past. In her exquisitely lyrical evocations of Jamaican lore and tradition, Goodison has always shown another side of history. While celebrating a wide cross-section of women—from Mahalia Jackson to Sandra Bland—Mother Muse focuses on two under-regarded “mothers” in Jamaican music: Sister Mary Ignatius, who nurtured many of Jamaica's most gifted musicians, and celebrated dancer Anita “Margarita” Mahfood. These important figures lead a collection of formidable scope and intelligence, one that seamlessly blends the personal and the political.