The City Still Breathing
(Coach House Books, 2013)

Agonie City (French translation by Eva Lavergne)
(Prise de parole, 2017)

A body is found on the side of a highway. Naked, throat slashed, no identification. It disappears from the back of a police van and begins a strange odyssey, making its way, over the course of one early winter night, all around the northern town of Sudbury and through the lives and dreams of eleven very different people. 

Recipient of Project Bookmark's 20th marker.

REVIEWS
'Heiti's Sudbury is a dark place, his characters caught between the desire to stay and the urge to flee ... The City Still Breathing brings to life the strange, proud beauty of has-beens and also-rans in one relentlessly hard-luck town.'
- The National Post

"Two constables find a dead body, naked and unidentified, by the side of Highway 17, only to somehow lose it in the police station parking lot. That’s the setup for Matthew Heiti’s dark but loving ode to 1980s Sudbury..."
- The Globe and Mail

"Matthew Heiti creates a dark, grim atmosphere that carries throughout the novel ...The City Still Breathing packs a quick yet intense punch."
- Quill & Quire

"One of the best works of dark humour I've read in years."
- Owen Sound Sun Times

"A lovely book, and a wild ride, right to the end."
- The Fiddlehead

'Matthew Heiti is our daring designated driver, taking us to places we thought we knew but have never truly seen before, in a car full of characters we won't soon forget. His writing is vivid, beautiful and profound.'
- John K. Samson

"This is a book with brains and muscle, resonant and intense, and Matthew Heiti is a prodigious talent, the spooky bard of mullets and muffin-tops, grow-ops and stolen snakeskin boots on Highway 69." 
- Mark Anthony Jarman