This fall, Quebec authors question the worlds we leave behind, those that lie in wait for us and those that we can still dream of in a society where cynicism, fear and withdrawal into oneself still allow a few bursts of beauty to shine through.
Ordinary Miracles
Dominique Fortier has the gift of unearthing, in the words of others, great truths about the small and great mysteries of existence. In When will the dawn come (Alto, September 27) — a story rocked by the fragility of the intimate — the author looks back on the stormy summer that followed the disappearance of her father. Here, she probes her memories — the most intimate contact that a human being has with fiction — to unearth those pearls of wisdom of which she alone has the secret. To the many questions that will punctuate her tortuous ascent towards mourning, she finds tracks and refuge in the blue of a river that flows upside down and a sky that pierces through the fog.
At the foot of Mont Saint-Hilaire, the ancestral orchards are disappearing in favor of housing estates. Fortunately, a few emancipated artists – cabinetmakers, craftsmen and licensees – hold body and place, form centers of resistance to dream of a future where slowness and transmission regain their rights. A park for the living (2017), first novel by Sebastien La Rocque, proposed flight as a solution to the emptiness of a society battered by desires for performance and possession. With Correlieu (Horse of August, October 4), he is betting on staying, on finding, within a community and its stories, the strength to challenge this frantic race forward and to access what there remains freedom.
In everything she does, Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette wields love like others, the sword. After forest woman (2021), a novel about family and filiation, the writer and filmmaker recounts in river woman (Leaf merchant, October 7) the birth of a great love between a painter and a woman who came to turn his life upside down. Gently spreading her nets, she harvests, in the wild beauty of the river, ordinary miracles, wounds that have become pearls and the audacity of women who embrace the rhythm of the tides.
In everything she undertakes, the writer and filmmaker Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette brandishes love like others, the sword.
With Nirliit (2015), her first novel, Juliana Léveillé-Trudel offered, from his experience in the field of education in Nunavut, one of the most sensitive, introspective and pathos-free novels about the Inuit community and the “punched-in-the-gut beauty that exudes the Far North”. In We have all fall (La Peuplade, October 4), she continues to reflect on the contradictions underlying the desire to teach young people whose reality is completely different from her own. From her pen rooted in the flamboyance of the tundra, the novelist recalls the importance of knowing how to take a step back to better listen and bow before a people who are taking control of their future.
Intimate dives
Sophie Welcomehas a weakness for those who are flayed alive, those who doubt, who fall, who fail, those who love too much, love badly, love alone. When Yvan, an alcoholic and without news of his daughter for 20 years, learns that he has an incurable disease, he is faced with a great dilemma: forgive himself and reconnect with his loved ones or abandon himself to decay. From then on, the story splits in two, telling in parallel the destinies of the same man, prisoner of the roles imposed on him and the consequences of his choices on those he loves and on the path that leads to forgiveness. I was a hero (The August Horse, September 20) fully embraces the flaws and injuries of souls in pain imprinted with a poetry that the majority refuses to perceive.
The public will discover a whole new facet of Marianna Mazza this fall as she publishes her first book, Montreal North (Quebec America, October 18). In this autobiographical story, she pays homage to her mother, a woman who, despite her loneliness and her difficulty in making ends meet, rocked her children with love, laughter and adventures, as well as in the neighborhood of its childhood and its inhabitants. The comedian reveals there an immense sensitivity and a very fine look on beings with trying journeys, forced by their quest for love to turn back to walk again on their own steps.
Catherine Pelletier, fiery, rebellious and radiant young woman from the popular novel The Goddess of Fireflies (2014), is back under the pen of Genevieve Pettersen. Now an adult, tired of a couple that no longer holds water and prisoner of the expectations imposed on women, journalists, lovers and mothers, she goes through disappointments and ruptures and tames the rebirth of her desire and her limits. A great meditation on freedom, criss-crossed — we guess it — by dizzying emotional roller coasters. queen of nothing (Stanke, November 2)
Each new novel is an opportunity for Patrick Nicol to deepen — by reinventing it — his reflection on the wear and tear of time and old age. In I was right next to (Le Quartanier, October 12), Pierre, a CEGEP professor, is witnessing the social and discursive transformations that are rocking Quebec between maple spring and the COVID-19 pandemic. Through a series of snapshots, the author of Events (2019) questions with finesse and self-mockery the nostalgia that awaits intellectuals and the challenges imposed by the disappearance of an era on which our identity and our values are based. Enough to make your own cognitive biases bite the dust.
The unclassifiable
Virtuoso of polyphonic universes and narrative tours de force, Jeans–Simon Rocks joined Boréal with The world will fall back on you (October 18), a novel that has “the rigor of an algorithm and the elegance of a Moebius strip”. The author, faithful to his own way, stages a gallery of characters whose destinies intersect through chance encounters, from a Montreal bus shelter to a Vancouver alley, passing through the remains of Chernobyl and a Parisian café. . In this series of heady-paced micro-narratives, Jean-Simon DesRochers paints an exhaustive and cynical portrait of the contemporary world and its most disturbing currents.
Each time he undertakes a romantic project, Emmanuel Aquin — recognizable by his baroque style, grating and highly imaged — seems to invest the smallest recesses of his thought, pushing his reflection, his pen, his erudition to their paroxysm. After two ambitious trilogies, the son of Hubert Aquin is launching the first volume of a vast cycle with historical accents, The Megantic Saga. The taste of far (Leméac, in bookstores) opens with the young Morrison, in Scotland in 1804. In a hurry to escape a boring existence, he enlists in the British army, then at war against Napoleon. After a stay in the stifling plains of Calabria and a few torrid nights in Sicily, the young corporal is taken prisoner in Cairo, where he will pay dearly for his taste for adventure. What to get out of the doldrums of everyday life in a few pages.