100 books like The Cruellest Month

Come on, we who slog through loss need a break from other people’s grief. I offer The Cruelest Month as one of my favorite L. Penny books in which to escape.

I escape to the façade of the idyl of Three Pines. Smell the brioche from Gabri and Olivier’s Bistro, dodge an insult from Ruth walking her duck. Despite betrayal and mortal danger, Inspector Gamache is sure to prevail. I need these people.

Death is complicated by human emotional frailty in The Cruelest Month as death is in “true” life. The séance at the evil Hadley House offers hope, for some, of bringing back lost souls. I too sometimes yearn to bring back my wandering souls. Penny has talent with phrasing, braiding of stories within the story, and professorial knowledge of the arcane. All a break from “dealing” with the mire of loss.

I loved this book because I’m in love with the central character, the very distinguished Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surete’ du Quebec, who works and plays well with his investigative team. He lives in the fictional community/neighborhood of Three Pines, and I wondered for a while if there were any homes for sale. He is smart, kind, thoughtful, and very married—to a woman who is a retired art librarian and could be my friend. As a solo ager, I can dream, can’t I?

Though this is Penny’s first in the “Three Pines” series featuring CI Armand Gamache, I’ll confess that I initially read it out of order. I picked up a later Penny book and liked it well enough to go back and start from the beginning.

This book feels like a debut. The writing is good, but not quite as sure-handed as more recent books (which makes sense). It introduces us to Armand Gamache, a seasoned detective if ever there was one, and to the cast of characters in Three Pines.

By the time I finished it the first time around, I’d become a legit Gamache fan-girl. This series is one of the few that I’m so enamored with that I pre-order forthcoming titles. ‘Nuff said.

André Breton’s book is a patchwork of literary forms, crazy-quilted together to form an amazing image of the world during World War II. At that time, Breton was in exile from Nazi-occupied France, and he visited Quebec in Canada to experience again the comfort and familiarity of being in a French-speaking land.

The book is part poetry and part prose, sometimes a journal, at other times a political meditation, and then a series of stories from mythology and the mystic Tarot. Breton’s ultimate take on living through a world war for the second time is that our daily existence needs to be re-impassioned to prevent violence from becoming the alternative to the mundane. I was fortunate to translate this classic from French to English. 

I love the genesis of this book — a high school writing workshop for newcomers to Quebec, Canada. And I love that within its pages, students from around the world — the Philippines, Uruguay, Pakistan, China, Moldova Iran, South Korea, United Arab Emirates, Israel, and Venezuela — come together to share their personal experiences of seeking peace and security in a new country. Students share the pain and loss of being forced to leave their homes, families, friends, and way of life behind and reflect on their changing identities with strength and vulnerability. Illustrated with expressive portraits by Rogè, the collection powerfully conveys the uncertainty these young immigrants face and the cautious hope they have for the future. 

If, like the charming heroine of this laugh-out-loud comic, you are obsessed with murder mysteries and true-crime tales, you’re sure to be delighted by this winking pastiche of the detective novel. Set in the (very fictional and completely absurd) Hawaiian Quarter of Trois-Rivieres, Quebec, The Pineapples of Wrath follows Marie-Plum Porter, bartender at a tiki lounge and intrepid amateur gumshoe, as she investigates the mysterious death of a local limbo champion. Not only is this book full to the brim with kitschy jokes and clever allusions, it also manages to be a totally satisfying mystery that kept me guessing all the way to the last page!

That’s right, a cookbook. Julian Armstrong was the long-time food editor for The Montreal Gazette, Quebec’s largest English-language newspaper. I lean heavily on this book to re-connect with my French heritage. What I love about A Taste of Quebec is its economy – one page, a short description, a list of ingredients with measurements, and a small insert telling you where the recipe originated and a little about that region. That’s it, on to the next page. Unlike online recipes – which can be convenient – there are no ads or long narratives about the author’s personal and complicated relationship with fennel. 

I must have read this book at least half a dozen times over the years. Trevanian was the author of The Eiger Sanction, which became a film starring Clint Eastwood and served as my introduction to Trevanian.

Set in Montreal, this character-driven novel centres around a world-weary detective named LaPointe and the characters on his beat. Close to retirement, Lapointe finds himself on the trail of a killer. Will he catch him before his own past catches up with him? It’s a great story.

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.

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.