LEILA MARSHY IS HAIKUBOXER: WRITER, EDITOR, FIERCE PUNCTUATOR
March 2025
From the highways of Cairo to the outports of Newfoundland, the soul-crushing cubicles of 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, lesbians in love and grief, wives, workers, and so many others fighting their way from out under.
Beautifully cohesive across the stunning depth and range of setting and subject, no one is innocent in My Thievery of the People.
"With My Thievery of the People, Marshy establishes herself as a masterful writer of intricate, intergenerational plots.​
...In settings across Canada and Egypt, Marshy attends to the most quotidian situations of our lives to extract the layered stories within. She considers the human desire for authenticity amid all that feels predestined by class and citizenship. By turns cynical and tender, My Thievery of the People breaks the complacency of the everyday through shock, satire, and the gravitas of subtext."
SHAZIA HAFIZ RAMJI, Literary Review of Canada
"My favourite short story collection of the year so far, My Thievery of the People is imbued with qualities both folkloric and darkly magical, as well as violent and adamantly political, featuring heroines aplenty."
THALIA SCOPA, Scout Magazine
"My Thievery of the People helps us believe 2025 might not be that bad after all, and that big tech and other power structures should fear us. Marshy’s figures of power are fundamentally fragile and could crumble in the face of disaster, or fate, or chance."
LÉA MURAT-INGLES, Montreal Review of Books
"Tightly woven, electric and exciting. Rooted deeply in place, My Thievery of the People depicts 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, or 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)
“A household in a Montreal suburb suffused with marital tension, a dusty village in an unnamed Middle Eastern country, a mysteriously archaic travelling circus: My Thievery is a delightfully engrossing and awe-inspiring collection that transports us from the mundane to the exotic and spaces in between, all in the service of the sort of satisfying, trend-defying morality tales in which the consequences of our choices can include death––or at least retribution.”
ANITA ANAND, A Convergence of Solitudes