Description
Book SynopsisThe first volume in the beloved novelist Marie-Claire Blais' prize-winning novel cycle acclaimed as one of the greatest undertakings in modern Quebec fiction reissued in a handsome A List edition, featuring an introduction by Lisa Moore.
Originally published in 1995 under the title Soifs, the first novel in Marie-Claire Blais' masterful series won the Governor General's Award for French Fiction and was hailed by critics around the world as a tour de force, comparing Blais to such literary greats as Virginia Woolf, Dante, Sophocles, and Shakespeare. In this dazzling rendering, These Festive Nights, celebrated translator Sheila Fischman brings Blais' novel to life for English-speaking readers.
A sun-drenched paradise in the Gulf of Mexico surrounded by the glimmering blue sea; Renata is convalescing on this island poised between two worlds: between great wealth and extreme poverty, between the past a
Trade Review
Marie-Claire Blais’s best, and without a doubt, the richest and most impressive tableau d’époque I have read in a long time . . . Blais has modestly, generously, written The Divine Comedy of our time. * Le Devoir *
[These Festive Nights] resounds with what has become a Blais leitmotif: the spiritual thirst born of hardship, and the hunger for redemption in a brutal world. * The Gazette *
[In These Festive Nights] Marie-Claire Blais appeals to the best part of who we are. It’s a book that we finish reluctantly and with a deep sense of gratitude for the characters who, like the heroes of Sophocles and Shakespeare, are the messengers of a hidden truth of fundamental concern to the human heart. * Magazine Littéraire *
