news | Monday May 4, 2015

Rose Brouillard, Lost and Found, Home at Last

Today we welcome our Spring 2015 fiction title, The Keeper’s Daughter by Jean-François Caron (translated by W. Donald Wilson). This misty, shifting story is now available for $14.95.

About the book: As a way to draw visitors to their isolated fishing village on Quebec’s North Shore, the tourist bureau commissions a documentary film recreating life as it was lived there in the 1940s and 50s. To gather material for the project, the filmmaker is sent in search of Rose Brouillard, now an old woman but raised on an island just offshore by Onile, a local fisherman. Rose is finally tracked down in Montreal, where she lives a solitary life fogged by one of the inevitabilities of old age – failing memory.

Structured as a series of short cinematic “takes,” this novel about recovering both personal and shared histories is told in a polyphony of voices. Châtelaine called it a “sheer joy to read.” We think you’ll agree.