Description

March 2025

From the highways of Cairo to the outports of Newfoundland, the soul-crushing cubicles of Montreal city work and the deceptive perils of the Quebec countryside, these brilliant short stories lay bare the workings of power and the small acts of both courage and compromise by which those on the margins defy them.

Marshy’s distinctive style and untamed strength guides the reader in an electrifying high-wire act through the inner lives of refugees, queers in love and grief, wives, workers, and so many others fighting their way out from under.

Beautifully cohesive across a stunning depth and range of setting and subject, no one is innocent in My Thievery of the People.

Leila Marshy is of Palestinian-Newfoundland parentage, which explains a lot. During the First Intifada, she worked for the Palestinian Mental Health Association in Gaza, and Medical Aid for Palestine in Montreal. Her first novel, The Philistine, was published in 2018 and in French in 2021. She lives in Montreal.

PRAISE

“Tightly woven, electric, exciting, and rooted deeply in place, Marshy’s stories depict the everyday life of a host of characters: a Cairo daughter daunted by her brother’s return, a paranoid Montreal snow plow driver, a Russian “knife guy” working at a circus in Las Vegas, an Egyptian waiter serving a tourist family on a boat, a mysterious Quebecois beekeeper off the side of the road. Emotionally unpredictable and incredibly immediate, Marshy’s voice is both stark and like a pulsing half-dream, caught between reality and something else. Each story left me wondering but not dissatisfied, curious to know what the next story would bring. An excellent follow-up to her wonderful debut, The Philistine.”
––Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch, The Good Arabs (Winner of the Grand Prix du Livre de Montreal, 2022)

“Powerful, compelling and trend-defying morality tales rendered in astonishing, cinematic prose.”
–– Anita Anand, A Convergence of Solitudes