81 books like Miss Montreal

The Couple Next Door is an addictive page-turner. It’s clever and creative, and nearly every chapter ends with a cliffhanger that practically requires you to keep reading.

Lapena pulls you into the frenzied search for the missing baby while casting doubt onto nearly every character. The use of multiple points of view ratchets up the tension. Entertaining and fast-paced, this is perfect as a beach read. Bonus points as this is a debut novel!

The abbey of St.-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups and its immediate surroundings is so much a part of this mystery novel that it almost becomes a character in its own right. Louise Penny has woven a complex plot in the tradition of Agatha Christie (isolated location, every inhabitant a suspect), and has infused the narrative with her own trademark attention to character development. Even those readers who are unfamiliar with Chief Inspector Gamache and his side-kick, Inspector Beauvoir will quickly come to care about their relationship and their futures. 

I am a great fan of Louise Penny’s Gamache series, and this book is one of my favourites. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve read it.

I love surprises and characters who are not what they seem, and I enjoy a high-tech backdrop when it fits the story. When a character thinks he sees evidence of a crime in what’s basically Google Street View, he will not let go of it and drags our unwilling protagonist into danger.

I loved the emotional core of a man dealing with his brother’s mental health issues and the blossoming romance in his life.

This is the first of his seven novels all based in Toronto, which introduces a cast of characters who wind their way through the justice system: prosecutors, defense attorneys, politicians, detectives, police, and judges in a series which not only tracks a murderer, but provides an insight into issues that have become so problematic in society, whether it’s homelessness, schizophrenia, holocaust survival, or other current social issues. 

There is a twist behind every turn and if you enjoy police procedurals this has been written by the ultimate insider, a Toronto practicing criminal lawyer who has seen it all and has a gift for story-telling.

Wallace—a history professor, librarian, and bookseller—was one of Canada’s first true crime writers. This collection of sixteen stories of murder and mayhem, first published in 1931, is a trove of long-forgotten tales. Some of the crimes he chronicles made international headlines. Harry and Dallas Hyams, identical twin brothers from New Orleans, were accused of killing an employee in Toronto in 1893 to collect on insurance policies. Adelard Delorme, a Catholic priest in Montreal, stood trial four times for the 1922 murder of his brother and was ultimately set free. Wallace apologized for straying from mainstream history into the realm of the gruesome and sensational to record, as he put it, “what God in His wisdom saw fit to permit to happen.”

This book is a reimagining of Alice in Wonderland that takes place in a bizarre 90s Montreal parallel world, and it’s every bit as mind-bending and crazy as it sounds. There’s disturbing violence and sexual elements, but somehow, it never felt gimmicky. It’s a coming-of-age story unlike any I’ve ever read, and I’d recommend it to anyone who speaks French.

A rich mix here: humor, mild suspense, serious themes encompassing Jewishness and the fallout of the Nazis’ mass murder of European Jews, and cautionary themes about obsessions and the dangers of hero worship. The background setting is a Montreal neighborhood Richler grew up in, knew well, and happily depicted.

Some of Richler’s other novels also describe Montreal and some of its people. You could argue that Barney’s Version and Solomon Gursky Was Here are better books overall. I particularly liked this one because it has a youthful verve and adventurous feel.

Of course this title will catch anyone’s attention, but I’m including it here because of how mundane the plot is. It’s just people people’ing and therefore experiencing and learning. They just happen to be all the things they are. It’s a fun and funny ride living in a small Parisian apartment with these characters, eating their food, and laying with their friends. 

Canadians have long worried about their national identity. Indeed, some have considered whether or not there even is one.

Poulter, in her innovative and stimulating book, examines an early attempt in the mid-nineteenth century to create an imagined Canadian identity. Wishing to distance themselves from a quintessential “British” identity, second-generation Montreal Anglophones were searching for a new way to identify. They saw themselves as “native Canadians”.

To solidify this identity, they pursued, as Poulter explained, “national attributes, or visual icons, that came to be recognized at home and abroad as distinctly “Canadian.’” It meant, in practice, taking up propriate costumes and sports such as snowshoeing, tobogganing, winter hunting, and lacrosse. All of these activities – undertaken in sartorially correct attire – had previously been the preserve of the Indigenous and French Canadians. Here, was an Englishness reimagined on a frozen landscape.

By imposing perceived British attributes of order, discipline, and… show more.

Likely the origin of my love for books within books, especially those lost or deliberately destroyed, this is the third book in the Emily Starr trilogy, the lesser-known series by Canadian author L.M. Montgomery, of Anne of Green Gables fame.

In it, budding novelist Emily decides against going off to college in the city with her three best friends to remain on her aunt’s Canadian farm, New Moon, and write. She finishes her first novel, A Seller of Dreams (what a title!), in a fit of creative joy but struggles to find a publisher.

Close to despair, she gives it to her bookish friend Dean Priest, an older man who’s in love with her, asking if it’s any good. Aware that her devotion to writing will keep her from him, he lies that the book is “artificial” and the characters “wooden.”

Emily throws it on the fire in her… show more.