Search results for ""Author Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette""

CBC BOOKS WORKS OF CANADIAN FICTION TO READ IN THE FIRST HALF OF 202349th SHELF EDITORS' PICK FOR JUNE 2023When a family is forced to return to the mother’s childhood home, she seeks meaning in her ancestral roots and the violent beauty of the natural world.Fleeing the city at the beginning of the pandemic, two families are cramped together in a small century-old country house. Winter seeps through the walls, the wallpaper is peeling, and mice make their nest in the piano. Without phones or internet, they turn to the outdoors, where a new language unfolds, a language of fireflies and clover. The five children explore nature and its treasures, while our narrator, Anaïs, turns to the eccentric neighbours and her own family history to find peace and meaning in the middle of her life.To the Forest is a field guide to a quieter life, a call to return to the places where we can reweave the threads of memory, where existence waltzes with death, where we can recapture what it means to be alive.

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Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette never knew her mother’s mother. Curious to understand why her grandmother, Suzanne, a sometime painter and poet associated with Les Automatistes, a movement of dissident artists that included Paul-Émile Borduas, abandoned her husband and young family, Barbeau-Lavalette hired a private detective to piece together Suzanne’s life.Suzanne, winner of the Prix des libraires du Québec and a bestseller in French, is a fictionalized account of Suzanne’s life over eighty-five years, from Montreal to New York to Brussels, from lover to lover, through an abortion, alcoholism, Buddhism, and an asylum. It takes readers through the Great Depression, Québec's Quiet Revolution, women’s liberation, and the American civil rights movement, offering a portrait of a volatile, fascinating woman on the margins of history. And it’s a granddaughter’s search for a past for herself, for understanding and forgiveness.‘It’s about a nameless despair, an unbearable sadness. But it’s also a reflection on what it means to be a mother, and an artist. Most of all, it’s a magnificent novel.’– Les MéconnusAnaïs Barbeau-Lavalette is a Montreal-based author and director. She was named the 2012 Artist for Peace by the social justice organization Les Artistes Pour la Paix.Rhonda Mullins is a writer and translator living in Montréal. She received the 2015 Governor General's Literary Award for Twenty-One Cardinals, her translation of Jocelyne Saucier's Les héritiers de la mine.

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The lives of three families intersect in the hallways of an apartment block in a Montreal neighborhood. Mélissa, Roxane, and Kevin have never had it easy. As their parents face their own struggles – with addiction, unemployment, and abuse – they must learn to fend for themselves. Though their lives converge at school, on the street, at the corner store, or when they can hear each other through their apartments’ thin walls, they each feel deeply alone. Neighbourhood Watch tells their coming-of-age stories with a cinematic ease, moving between despair and the unalterable hope of childhood. With her characteristic poetic flair and generosity, Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, author of the acclaimed Suzanne, has painted, in brief strokes, an unforgettable and moving portrait of a fictional apartment block in Montreal. This translation of her 2010 debut novel is presented with an afterword interview with a woman who, as a child, was the inspiration behind the character of Roxane. ‘This is prose to lose yourself in. Never complicated, it’s gentle like a love song, comforting and enveloping like a black-and-white film, full of tones and textures. These sentences can destroy us. Not for their simplicity, but for the powerful beauty within the simplicity.’ —Peter McCambridge, ‘Best Translated Book Award: Why This Book Should Win,’ on Suzanne

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