Steven Le Hérault

Fifteen years after going to Paris and Dublin, two Québécois — Steven and Gabriella Beauchemin — return home to renew relations with their tribal family in the spiritually gutted atmosphere of their post-terrorism, post-Parti-Québécois, post-referendum province … they are home to root around in the four corners of the Quebec dream. They have to contend with Pa, a neurasthenic, who stuffs bizarre black birds, constructing a mordant plastic Christmas tree; Uncle Phil — eking out a living in his basement flat — who hopes to redeem his homeland by winning the big lottery; Machine-Gun Jean-Maurice, the doorman at the low-life cabaret on rue Saint-Laurent, a den of cocaine. It is Able, the writer in the family, who must deal with all the questions and enigmas that bedevil Steven in this wonderful novel that is at once a romance of love and a picaresque adventure story.

Victor-Lévy Beaulieu is a major Quebec novelist, the author of some thirty books.