One Day Even Trevi Will Crumble

An extraordinary new fiction talent! One Day, Even Trevi Will Crumble is rare among first collections of stories in its scope and originality.

All set in the Montreal neighbourhood of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, these tales of taxi drivers, bums, and the lonely are told in a prose that is straight up and deeply felt. McDevitt’s characters have their eyes and ears tuned into a world that, although crumbling, is bursting with feeling. The edgy urban feel of many younger writers is matched in this collection with a boundless compassion for the city. Stories with both the grit and tenderness of city life.

McDevitt, to his credit, puts his heart where his prose is. His stories, frequently about vums and hookers and barflies or just characters down on their luck, are distinguished by a tough and tender brand of lyricism, McDevitt’s particular mix of poetry and edginess. McDevitt employs tales and urban legends, even Greek myths to make his point that even the most obscure lives are imbued eith significance, evena basic magic. The image of Icarus flying too close to the sun, for example, runs through the collection, both as a calm warning and a dream wroth chasing.

“That is my big thing,” McDevitt admits. “We have our moments of grace and we all have our falls.”