Book picks similar to
Eucalyptus by Mauricio Segura


french
fiction
lit-canadian
21st-century

At Night All Blood is Black


David Diop - 2018
    When his friend Mademba Diop, in the same regiment, is seriously injured in battle, Diop begs Alfa to kill him and spare him the pain of a long and agonizing death in No Man’s Land. Unable to commit this mercy killing, madness creeps into Alfa’s mind as he comes to see this refusal as a cruel moment of cowardice. Anxious to avenge the death of his friend and find forgiveness for himself, he begins a macabre ritual: every night he sneaks across enemy lines to find and murder a blue-eyed German soldier, and every night he returns to base, unharmed, with the German’s severed hand. At first his comrades look at Alfa’s deeds with admiration, but soon rumors begin to circulate that this super soldier isn’t a hero, but a sorcerer, a soul-eater. Plans are hatched to get Alfa away from the front, and to separate him from his growing collection of hands, but how does one reason with a demon, and how far will Alfa go to make amends to his dead friend?Peppered with bullets and black magic, this remarkable novel fills in a forgotten chapter in the history of World War I. Blending oral storytelling traditions with the gritty, day-to-day, journalistic horror of life in the trenches, David Diop's At Night All Blood is Black is a dazzling tale of a man’s descent into madness.Selected by students across France to win the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, David Diop’s English-language, historical fiction debut At Night All Blood is Black is a “powerful, hypnotic, and dark novel” (Livres Hebdo) of terror and transformation in the trenches of the First World War.

Blue Bear Woman


Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau - 2007
    The story of a young Cree woman's search for her roots and identity, this is also the author's debut novel, originally published in 2007, and it will be her second book to be published in English. The novel has been described as a "texte de resistance", showing contemporary Indigenous life and the impact on the Cree of the building of the Eastmain dam in northern Quebec, posited as "virgin" territory, yet which has actually been part of the Cree traditional territory since time immemorial. In search of her roots, Victoria takes a trip to the country of her Cree ancestors with her companion, Daniel. It is a long journey to the north along the shores of James Bay. Colours, smells, and majestic landscapes arouse memories that soon devolve into strange and hauntings dreams at night. In bits and pieces, uncles, aunties, and cousins arrive to tell the story of Victoria's family and bring with them images of her childhood that are tinged both with joy and sadness. Guided by her totem, the Blue Bear, she returns home to make peace with her soul, as well as release the soul of her great-uncle, a hunter who has been missing in the forest for over twenty years.

Mauve Desert


Nicole Brossard - 1987
    A seminal text in Canadian and feminist literature, Mauve Desert is a must-read for readers and writers alike.This is both a single novel and three separate novels in one. In the first, Mauve Desert, fifteen-year-old Mélanie drives across the Arizona desert in a white Meteor chasing fear and desire, cutting loose from her mother and her mother's lover, Lorna, in their roadside Mauve Motel. In the second book, Maudes Laures reads Mauve Desert, becomes obsessed with it, and embarks on an extraordinary quest for its mysterious author, characters and meaning. The third book – Mauve, the horizon – is Laures's eventual translation of Mauve Desert. Like all good translations, it is both the same and revealingly different from the original.Nicole Brossard's writing is agile and inventive; from moment to moment gripping, exhilarating and erotic. Her language drifts and swells like sand dunes in a desert, cresting and accumulating into a landscape that shifts like wind and words; she translates the practice of translation, the pulse of desire.

The Girl Who Was Saturday Night


Heather O'Neill - 2014
    Now, in The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, she returns to the grubby, enchanted city with a light and profound tale of the vice of fame and the ties of family.Nineteen years old, free of prospects, and inescapably famous, the twins Nicholas and Nouschka Tremblay are trying to outrun the notoriety of their father, a French-Canadian Serge Gainsbourg with a genius for the absurd and for winding up in prison. “Back in the day, he could come home from a show with a paper bag filled with women’s underwear. Outside of Québec nobody had even heard of him, naturally. Québec needed stars badly.”Since the twins were little, Étienne has made them part of his unashamed seduction of the province, parading them on talk shows and then dumping them with their decrepit grandfather while he disappeared into some festive squalor. Now Étienne is washed up and the twins are making their own almost-grown-up messes, with every misstep landing on the front pages of the tabloid Allo Police. Nouschka not only needs to leave her childhood behind; she also has to leave her brother, whose increasingly erratic decisions might take her down with him.

Slave Old Man


Patrick Chamoiseau - 1997
    Chamoiseau's exquisitely rendered new novel is an adventure for all time, one that fearlessly portrays the demonic cruelties of the slave trade and its human costs in vivid, sometimes hallucinatory prose. Offering a loving and mischievous tribute to the creole culture of Martinique and brilliantly translated by Linda Coverdale, this novel takes us on a unique and moving journey into the heart of Caribbean history.

The Night Will Be Long


Santiago Gamboa - 2019
    But no sooner does the violence happen than it disappears, vanished without a trace. Nobody claims to have seen anything. Nobody claims to have heard anything. That is, until an anonymous accusation catalyzes a dangerous investigation into the deep underbelly of the Christian churches present today in Latin America. The Night Will Be Long is a dark, twisting thriller filled with moments of humor and pain--a story that will stick with readers long after they turn the last page.

Misery Bay: A Mystery


Chris Angus - 2016
    But the islands and hidden coves hide something more sinister. Illegal immigrants and drugs are being smuggled in for the escort services in Halifax. Special Constable Garrett Barkhouse has spent twenty years fighting these twin scourges, but now he’s burned out and planning to retire. However, his boss, Deputy Commissioner Alton Tuttle, has other plans. He entices Garrett to return to his old home town and establish a police presence on the Eastern shore. What he expects will be light duty—Garrett quickly discovers—is anything but. An unexpected murder of four young girls leads him into a thick web of interconnecting drug pushers, illegal immigrants, and prostitution.While he tries to get a handle on events, Garrett is sucked back into many of the relationships from his childhood. The cast of colorful characters includes Roland Cribby, a scallop fisherman and all around unpleasant character, old man Publicover who has just married his fifth wife, beautiful reporter Kitty Wells, and Garrett’s cousin, a giant of a man who is an enforcer for the Longshoremen on the waterfront in Halifax.An offshore oil rig, conveniently outside Canadian territorial waters, becomes the focus of the investigation. Global Resources CEO Anthony DeMaio has developed a nice sideline to the oil business. When Kitty Wells—the beautiful reporter—tries to investigate, she is swept up by the machinations and kidnapped into sex slavery. As a series of hurricanes push in from the North Atlantic, Garrett and Lonnie find themselves fighting not only drug lords and CEOs but also the elements that threaten to topple the oil rig and kill everyone on board.Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Antigonick


Anne Carson - 2012
    Antigonick is her first attempt at making translation into a combined visual and textual experience: it will provoke poetry readers, classical scholars, theatre people and comic-book aficionados.

My Heart Hemmed In


Marie NDiaye - 2007
    My Heart Hemmed In is her most powerful statement on the hidden selves that we rarely glimpse—and are often shocked by.There is something very wrong with Nadia and her husband Ange, middle-aged provincial schoolteachers who slowly realize that they are despised by everyone around them. One day a savage wound appears in Ange’s stomach, and as Nadia fights to save her husband’s life their hideous neighbor Noget—a man everyone insists is a famous author—inexplicably imposes his care upon them. While Noget fattens them with ever richer foods, Nadia embarks on a nightmarish visit to her ex-husband and estranged son—is she abandoning Ange or revisiting old grievances in an attempt to save him?Conjuring an atmosphere of paranoia and menace, My Heart Hemmed In creates a bizarre, foggy world where strange coincidences, harsh cruelty, and constantly shifting relationships all seem part of some shadowy truth. Surreal, allegorical, and psychologically acute, My Heart Hemmed In shows a masterful author giving her readers her most complex and compelling world yet.

Fish Change Direction in Cold Weather


Pierre Szalowski - 2000
    The next day an ice storm covers his city. When the power goes out and the temperature drops, people must turn to each other to survive. But for one neighbourhood the catastrophe brings surprising new beginnings. Julie, the dancer who lives across the street, helps Boris, an eccentric Russian mathematician, save his fish from the cold weather. And the urbane Michel and Simon open their door to Alexis, their embittered neighbour, and his son. But will the ice storm bring the boy's parents back together?

Broken Glass


Alain Mabanckou - 2005
    In a country that appears to have forgotten the importance of remembering, a former schoolteacher and bar regular nicknamed Broken Glass has been elected to record their stories for posterity. But Broken Glass fails spectacularly at staying out of trouble as one denizen after another wants to rewrite history in an attempt at making sure his portrayal will properly reflect their exciting and dynamic lives. Despondent over this apparent triumph of self-delusion over self-awareness, Broken Glass drowns his sorrows in red wine and riffs on the great books of Africa and the West. Brimming with life, death, and literary allusions, Broken Glass is Mabanckou’s finest novel — a mocking satire of the dangers of artistic integrity.

The Sudden Weight of Snow


Laisha Rosnau - 2002
    Seventeen-year-old Sylvia (Harper) Kostak is caught between her mother’s regrets and the strictures of small-town life in the interior of British Columbia. When Harper meets Gabe, an intense and enigmatic young man living on the ’60s-style arts commune outside of town, she is transfixed. Gradually we learn Gabe’s story and what led him to join his estranged mother on the commune, where, in a bid for freedom, Harper eventually finds herself, setting in motion a series of events leading to tragedy. Resonant with longing and a sense of isolation, the novel brings alive the agonies and ecstasies of growing up, sexual discovery, and how the need to belong can shape both decisions and destinies.Author Biography: Laisha Rosnau was born in Pointe Claire, Quebec, and grew up in Vernon, British Columbia. She has worked as a child-care worker, a landscaper, a waitress, a fruit picker, an interpretive guide, a journalist, and an editor. She received a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, where she was the Executive Editor of PRISM international. Her poetry and short fiction have been published in literary journals and anthologies in Canada, the United States, and Australia. The Sudden Weight of Snow is her first novel. Laisha Rosnau lives in Vancouver, where she is at work on a collection of poetry and on her second novel.

Home Sweet Home


Kristen Brown - 2011
    Anxious to start a new life, Samantha decides to open up a business of her own, and throws herself into making the dream a reality. But along the way, there are plenty of obstacles popping up to make life a little more challenging than she expected - nosy neighbors and cranky in-laws, attractive men and pretentious sisters, a gossipy mother, mysterious hate mail, and ghosts from the past that threaten to destroy everything she's worked to achieve. And just when Sam thinks things couldn't possibly get worse, there's a murder on her property that the local detective seems mighty determined to pin on the newest resident of Peabody. Suddenly Sam is overwhelmed with troubles she never imagined, and she knows the only way to get through any of it is by keeping her sense of humor and trusting that God really does know exactly what He is doing.

Volkswagen Blues


Jacques Poulin - 1984
    The geographical journey — through Detroit, into Chicago, on to St. Louis, along the Oregon Trail and into California — becomes a metaphor for the exploration of the history of the French in North America.

Operation Wormwood


Helen C. Escott - 2018
    John’s, setting off a chain of events that leaves doctors mystified. He is the first of many victims suffering from severe nosebleeds and excruciating pain. Dr. Luke Gillespie and Nurse Agatha Catania investigate their symptoms but are unable to diagnose them. The only thing they have in common is Sgt. Nicholas Myra, an investigator with the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary.Dr. Gillespie and Sgt. Myra join forces to solve this twisted mystery. But the story takes a critical turn when Sister Pius, a nun from Mercy Convent, informs them about Wormwood: a disease she believes is created by God to kill perpetrators of the most heinous crimes. Wormwood becomes an international media storm when parish priest Father Peter Cooke holds a news conference on the steps of the Basilica of St. John the Baptist and announces that God has unleashed a plague upon the earth.Is God truly punishing these criminals, or is a serial killer targeting them? Dr. Gillespie and Sgt. Myra race to find answers, while the Roman Catholic hierarchy starts bringing people back to the Church in droves . . . by cashing in on what it claims to be a miracle.