At the crossroads at the end of childhood, Nana faces the hectic passing of her adolescence and the arrival of new responsibilities as her grandmother Joséphine approaches her last hours. To calm the storm, Nana reads the enthralling tales of Josaphat-le-Violon – a returning character in Tremblay’s Plateau-Mont-Royal Chronicles. Three of Josaphat’s fantastical stories contain revelations whose full influence in her own existence Nana cannot yet measure. In parallel, Nana’s rebellious mother Maria languishes back in Montréal. She is torn between her desire to gather her young family around her and her deep uncertainty about being able to care for them properly. Always in search of what’s “best” and what’s “elsewhere,” will Maria seize the opportunity “which only hits the door of life once”?

However, the most difficult passage in the lives of Tremblay’s characters is that of time, inexorable, irrevocable, altering and often breaking everything in its path: the feelings and souls it binds and unbinds, sometimes for the better, and too often for the worse.

Rite of Passage is the awaited fourth instalment in Michel Tremblay’s enthralling and intensely moving Desrosiers Diaspora series of novels, translated from French by the critically acclaimed and long-time Tremblay specialist Linda Gaboriau. Novels Crossing the Continent (2008 Prix du grand public Salon du livre de Montréal / La Presse), Crossing the City (2009 Prix du grand public Salon du livre de Montréal / La Presse), and A Crossing of Hearts, instalments one, two, and three in Tremblay’s saga, were all published by Talonbooks.