This month, we’re celebrating the significance and vibrancy of the worldwide UNESCO City of Literature Network by bringing a fellow city into focus. We were thrilled to pair up with Québec City, the capital of the Canadian province of Quebec, which became a City of Literature in November 2018.

In order to get the best taste of Québec and its literary heritage, Quebec UNESCO City of Literature provided us with a hand-pick of their top five books in which to discover their beautiful city. In return, we provided them with five favourite books by writers who have lived and written in the city.

Read ‘Quebec City in five books’ 

‘Revelations of Divine Love’ by Julian of Norwich

Such is the raw drama, insight and comfort of her writing that Julian of Norwich (c. 8 November 1342 – c. 1416) has inspired those with and without faith for hundreds of years. The intimacy of her writing provides a rare window into the consciousness of a woman living in a very different time to ours. Struck down by sickness and believing herself to be on her deathbed, thirty-year-old Julian experiences a series of visions or ‘shewings’ in which Christ speaks to her – most famously telling her that “All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

She recovers and her collected writings became, in 1395, the first book published in English by a woman. Julian was an anchoress who lived a solitary life in a cell adjoined to a church. The church was mostly destroyed by bombing in 1942, the restored church sits just across the road from Dragon Hall which in the summer of 2018 will become the National Centre for Writing.

Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Never Let Me Go was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2005 and was listed in the TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. Ishiguro was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017 for his ‘novels of great emotional force’.

 

British Centre for Literary Translation. Tragically, he died in a car crash near Norwich in December 2001.