The Bigamist tells the story of a woman torn between her husband and her lover—and about her transition to a new life in a city teeming with multiple identities. Tension mounts as she risks offending everyone in her conservative immigrant community if she chooses to leave her husband.
The comings and goings between these two men reveal couples torn not only by conflicting loves and loyalties, but also by the chasm separating their present in Montreal from the past they've left behind.

Felicia Mihali is a Montreal writer, translator and Éditions Hashtag publisher who studies French, English, Chinese and Dutch along with postcolonial literature and history. Her first novel, Le pays du fromage, was published in 2002 by XYZ Éditeur, followed by six other works written in French. In 2012, she published her first book in English, The Darling of Kandahar (LLP), which was nominated for Canada Reads as one the year's best novels. The must-read 2021 novel Pineapple Kisses in Iqaluit appeared simultaneously in French as Une nuit d’amour à Iqaluit, and Judith Weisz Woodsworth's translation of Le pays du fromage was published as A Ramshackle Home (LLP, 2023) and became a CBC Books top 40 title.

Felicia Mihali's profile page

Linda Leith was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. One of the most international of Canadian writers, she has lived in London, Basel, Brussels, Paris, Ottawa, Budapest and Montreal, where she founded the hugely successful Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of London, England, and is the author of seven books, including the literary memoirs Writing in the Time of Nationalism and Marrying Hungary, as well as three critically well-received novels, Birds of Passage, The Tragedy Queen, and The Desert Lake, all published by Signature Editions. She has also been published by Vehicule Press and ECW Press, as well as XYZ Editeur and Lemeac (in French), and Rad (in Serbian).

Linda Leith's profile page

"This first-person narrative traces the story of a married Romanian immigrant woman who soon discovers that she has been far more profoundly uprooted than she expected. As she succumbs to the charms of another immigrant and dances between husband and lover, her experience casts new light on matters of the heart in the throes of migration." —Julie Roy, 5 October 2022
"Food, sex, Romanian immigrants and Montreal: Felicia Mihali's The Bigamist transforms the immigrant novel into a vigorous exploration of one writer's complicated passion for two diametrically opposite men, one of whom is her husband. Determined to follow her heart's desire in a cosmopolitan city, despite her community's real or feigned moral outrage, the narrator tells a tale of contradictory passions, and traditional values conflicting with contemporary facts. Deftly and cleanly translated by Linda Leith, The Bigamist is brief, bold, funny and profound." —Kenneth Radu, author of Net Worth