Montreal has produced an extraordinary range of literature in both French and English. These are the books that will help you understand the city.
Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen (1966). Cohen's second novel is set in Montreal and wanders across the city and through Quebec history in the way only Cohen could — surreal, erotic, and dense with Catholic imagery. Not an easy read but an essential one for understanding the city's creative obsessions.
The Watch that Ends the Night by Hugh MacLennan (1959). MacLennan's novel follows a Montreal man through the Depression years and the Spanish Civil War. Better than his more famous Two Solitudes, it captures the texture of Montreal's English-speaking community and its relationship to the city's French majority.
Cockroach by Rawi Hage (2008). Hage's Montreal novel follows an unnamed immigrant narrator through the streets and rooming houses of a winter city — dark, funny, and alive to the alienation of the immigrant experience. Hage himself is a Lebanese-Canadian writer who spent years in Montreal.
Five Roses by Alice Zorn (2016). A novel set in the neighbourhoods of Pointe-Saint-Charles and Little Burgundy as they gentrify — two women, two storylines, and a vivid sense of the neighbourhoods that existed before the coffee shops arrived.
Montreal Stories by Mavis Gallant. Gallant was born in Montreal in 1922 and left Canada for Paris in 1950, but her fiction returns obsessively to the city of her childhood — its class divisions, its cold winters, and the particular loneliness of its Anglo-Protestant society. The stories are among the finest short fiction written about the city.