The English translation of the novel The future by Catherine Leroux won the Canada Reads 2024 competition, the CBC “battle of the books”.
The Future was defended by Montreal author Heather O’Neill, whose book Lullabies for Little Criminals won the same distinction in 2017.
Catherine Leroux said she found it “very significant” to win Canada Reads 2024, whose theme was “books that move us forward”, with her novel published in French under the title The future.
“As I wrote this book and met readers over the years, I continued to think about the question that sparked it: how do we envision the future, how do we move forward? I hope that the answers I offer in the book will inspire Canadians everywhere,” she said in a press release.
“At the height of her art, in a deep and abundant language punctuated with dialogues written in an invented joual, Catherine Leroux also shows us a world where nature flourishes despite everything, where legends come to life and where magical realism reigns” , wrote Josée Lapointe in the pages of The Press about this novel.
The future was published in 2020 by Alto, a Quebec publisher which has also published several books by Heather O’Neill in French.