Philippe Falardeau

"After leaving graduate school to pursue her dream of becoming a writer, Joanna gets hired as an assistant to Margaret, the stoic and old-fashioned literary agent of J. D. Salinger. Joanna's main task is processing Salinger's voluminous fan mail, but as she reads the heart-wrenching letters from around the world, she becomes reluctant to send the agency's impersonal standard letter and impulsively begins personalizing the responses"--Container.

At a Montreal public grade school, an Algerian immigrant is hired to replace a popular teacher who committed suicide in her classroom. While helping his students deal with their grief, his own recent loss is revealed.

They were known simply as "The Lost Boys." Orphaned by the brutal civil war in Sudan that began in 1983, these young victims traveled as many as a thousand miles on foot in search of safety. Fifteen years later, a humanitarian effort would bring 3,600 lost boys and girls to America.

"When Michel, an uninspired inventor from Belgium who trades on the success of his father, discovers he is adopted, he sets off to find his birth parents in Canada under the guise of selling one of his pointless inventions"