McLelland & Stewart – $32.95

The final work from Leonard Cohen, Canada’s most celebrated poet and an artist whose audience spans generations and whose work is known and loved throughout the world.

The Flame is a stunning collection of Leonard Cohen’s last poems, selected and ordered by the author in the final months of his life. Featuring lyrics, prose pieces, and illustrations, the book also contains an extensive selection from Cohen’s notebooks, which he kept in poetic form throughout his life, and offers an unprecedentedly intimate look inside the life and mind of a singular artist and thinker.

An enormously powerful final chapter in Cohen’s storied literary career, The Flame showcases the full range of Leonard Cohen’s lyricism, from the exquisitely transcendent to the darkly funny. By turns devastatingly sad and winningly strange, these are the works of a poet and lyricist who set out to explore our darkest questions and came back wanting, yearning for more.

Baraka Books – $29.95

Shortlisted for the Giller Prize 2018

Nuns that appear out of thin air, a dinner party at the Goebbels’, Quebec’s very own Margaret Thatcher, a grandma that just won’t die (not until the archangel comes back)…Songs For The Cold Of Heart is a yarn to rival the best of them, a big fat whopper of a tall tale that bounces around from provincial Rivière-du-Loup in 1919 to Nagasaki, 1990s Berlin, Rome, and beyond. This is the novel of a century—long and glorious, stuffed full of parallels, repeating motifs, and unforgettable characters—with the passion and plotting of a modern-day Tosca.

St Martin’s Press – $36.50

Linden Malegarde has come home to Paris from the United States. It has been years since the whole family was all together. Now the Malegarde family is gathering for Paul, Linden’s father’s 70th birthday.

Each member of the Malegarde family is on edge, holding their breath, afraid one wrong move will shatter their delicate harmony. Paul, the quiet patriarch, an internationally-renowned arborist obsessed with his trees and little else, has always had an uneasy relationship with his son. Lauren, his American wife, is determined that the weekend celebration will be a success. Tilia, Linden’s blunt older sister, projects an air of false fulfillment. And Linden himself, the youngest, uncomfortable in his own skin, never quite at home no matter where he lives—an American in France and a Frenchman in the U.S.—still fears that, despite his hard-won success as a celebrated photographer, he will always be a disappointment to his parents.

Their hidden fears and secrets slowly unravel as the City of Light undergoes a stunning natural disaster, and the Seine bursts its banks and floods the city. All members of the family will have to fight to keep their unity against tragic circumstances. In this profound and intense novel of love and redemption, de Rosnay demonstrates all of her writer’s skills both as an incredible storyteller but also as a soul seeker.

Penguin UK – $59.95

‘Undoubtedly the best single-volume life of Churchill ever written’ Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times

A magnificently fresh and unexpected biography of Churchill, by one of Britain’s most acclaimed historians

Winston Churchill towers over every other figure in twentieth-century British history. By the time of his death at the age of 90 in 1965, many thought him to be the greatest man in the world.

There have been over a thousand previous biographies of Churchill. Andrew Roberts now draws on over forty new sources, including the private diaries of King George VI, used in no previous Churchill biography to depict him more intimately and persuasively than any of its predecessors. The book in no way conceals Churchill’s faults and it allows the reader to appreciate his virtues and character in full: his titanic capacity for work (and drink), his ability see the big picture, his willingness to take risks and insistence on being where the action was, his good humour even in the most desperate circumstances, the breadth and strength of his friendships and his extraordinary propensity to burst into tears at unexpected moments. Above all, it shows us the wellsprings of his personality – his lifelong desire to please his father (even long after his father’s death) but aristocratic disdain for the opinions of almost everyone else, his love of the British Empire, his sense of history and its connection to the present.

During the Second World War, Churchill summoned a particular scientist to see him several times for technical advice. ‘It was the same whenever we met’, wrote the young man, ‘I had a feeling of being recharged by a source of living power.’ Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt’s emissary, wrote ‘Wherever he was, there was a battlefront.’ Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, Churchill’s essential partner in strategy and most severe critic in private, wrote in his diary, ‘I thank God I was given such an opportunity of working alongside such a man, and of having my eyes opened to the fact that occasionally such supermen exist on this earth.’

Random House Canada – $52.00

An epic and revelatory biography of one of the most abidingly influential–and controversial–men in modern history.

Opening with Gandhi’s triumphant return to India in 1915 after decades abroad, and ending with his tragic assassination in 1949, Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World is a remarkable, moving portrait that provides a crucial re-evaluation of India’s iconic leader for a new generation.
Drawing on a wealth of newly uncovered materials unavailable to previous biographers, acclaimed historian and author Ramachandra Guha brings the past to life with extraordinary grace and clarity. Deploying his gifts as a storyteller and scholar, Guha presents Gandhi as both a fascinating human being–a man of fierce hope, eccentric personal beliefs, and sometimes dark and alarming contradictions–as well as a dynamic political force and global icon.
Sharp, insightful, balanced, and impeccably researched, this free-standing sequel to Guha’s magisterial biography Gandhi Before India is an indispensable resource for a contemporary understanding of Gandhi’s ever-evolving legacy.

Locarno Press – $32.95

The Book Toute la France is Talking About, Now Available in English “Literature doesn’t stop bullets. On the other hand, it can stop a finger from ending up on a trigger. Perhaps. It’s a bet worth making.” Erwan Larher was enjoying a rock concert in Paris’ Bataclan Theater on November 13, 2015, when the firing started. In this genre-bending, deeply moving and unexpected memoir, Larher reflects on what the gruesome terror attack meant to him and to others. The Book I Didn’t Want to Write transcends bearing witness. Larher’s voice is intertwined with others—his partner, his father, the two friends who were going to come but didn’t—to create a deeply moving collective chronicle of the most violent night in French history since World War II. He recounts not only how such an act affected him and his loved ones, but the thousands who lived through that night, the millions who followed the event through media, and even the attackers themselves. ‘You were in the wrong place at the wrong time; you’re a miracle, not a victim,’ he writes. Larher is anything but self-pitying. The book is all the more remarkable in its stoic, bold approach: perhaps to be expected from one of France’s most beloved rock-n-roll novelist with a suitably gritty look at the world and at words. There is no tearful history, unhealthy voyeurism or grudge-settling. Instead, Larher explains how he must, ‘write around because you are a novelist and not a chronicler, because you can only shape a text by appeasing literature.’ The Book I Didn’t Want to Write is remarkable in both its construction and content. It achieves what few titles can—and exactly what Larher set out to do—to remind us of life’s emotional and artistic depths despite tragedy. It is a masterful slap in the face and a hymn to life.