A northern Canadian village, one of many remote settlements dotting the Quebec landscape, is in transition. Originally dependent on subsistence farming and logging, supplemented by winter hunting, its economy has gradually changed over the years: first increasingly dependent on guiding southern urbanites on hunting trips; then on providing a habitat for birdwatchers, nature tourists and collectors of antiques and local crafts; now primarily dependent on income flows from cottagers and retirees.Each of these remarkably engaging stories is recounted by different narrators from the village’s diverse genders, social classes and employment and economic circumstances. This is a book of parentheses, which, like the spokes of a wheel or the sweep of the lines on a radar screen, gradually and collectively begin to delineate and define the eerie contemporary landscape of The Hunting Ground. Now devoid of any sense of a cohesive community or shared culture, each of these uncanny fragments of alienated and fragmented civilization and imagination is bracketed on the one hand by the passive and vacuous sentimentality of Reader’s Digest and television, and on the other by the senseless primal fury of killing and destruction. It is a clever and unsettling mockery of the many privately printed local histories” of small towns, feeding only the yearning nostalgia of the few surviving original inhabitants; the tourist trade vainly promoted by the local town council; and the ethnographic interest of urban professionals researching and cataloguing endangered species.

The Hunting Ground

Literature & Fiction

Tremblay, Lise

Genre Fiction

Talonbooks

In the seemingly endless small-town summer of 1968, a twelve-year-old girl contemplates with dread the social prospects of her fast-approaching enrollment in a class for gifted students at the local high school, arranged by her mother who blows up” at the drop of a hatshe doesn’t intend to let her daughter marry the first man to come along,” and she is prepared to do anything to make sure her children don’t grow up ignorant,” like Judith’s sister, Claire. To escape her mother’s unpredictable and interminable rants, the young girl locks herself in her room with her books, escaping into a life of imagination and dreams, mostly of older guys like Marius, as beautiful as a god when he dons his softball uniform every Wednesday to play in the community park, and to whom she writes anonymous love letters.Fortunately, there’s the prettiest girl in town to look up to. Recruited by the pop music band Bruce and the Sultans as their go-go dancer, if her audition in the big city of Montreal goes well, Claire is to accompany the band on their upcoming provincial tour. Idolized by the story’s unnamed narrator, Claire is the big sister” she never had, but whom she shares by proxy with her best friend, Judith.In this, her fifth book, Lise Tremblay paints a picture of rural Quebec in the years following the Quiet Revolution in her signature style so refreshingly free of artifice and literary hyperbole. Society is changing fast, new values are making inroads, but old traditions remain deeply rooted. Judith’s Sister is a coming-of-age novel that focuses on the timeless themes that preoccupy all adolescent girls: solitude, alienation, obesity, lies, sexuality, shame, madness, and fear of strangers; and our inevitable first encounters with the grown-up betrayals of friends, family, and community.

Judith's Sister

Literary

<p>Les cinq histoires de ce recueil mettent en scène un village en perdition où, sous les mensonges du quotidien, se cachent des drames croisés qui viennent bousculer la vie de ses habitants.</p>

La Heronniere (French Edition)

Contemporary

Actes-sud

LA DANSE JUIVE

LEMEAC

La Heronniere : Nouvelles

Lemeac Editeur, Incorporated

Chicoutimi-Nord, les années 70. L’été sera long. C’est le dernier avant le Secondaire. Il y a bien Judith, la meilleure amie. Il y a aussi Claire, la soeur de Judith, la plus belle fille de la ville. Mais il y a surtout cette mère qui « explose » tout le temps, qui ne laissera pas sa fille épouser le premier venu et qui est prête à tout pour que ses enfants ne soient pas des ignorants.« Ce que ce livre-là a de magique ? L’écriture tout simplement. La magie de l’écriture. Vous n’y verrez rien, c’est voulu, c’est précisément à cela que sert la magie : à cacher le travail d’écriture, l’effort d’écriture. C’est une petite fille qui parle, sans une fausse note, sans une pirouette inutile, qui parle avec des mots de Chicoutimi-Nord, des mots de 1960, des mots comme on en trouve dans le Échos-Vedettes qu’elle feuillette et dans les chansons de Bruce et les Sultans qu’elle écoute. La magie, c’est que cela soit devenu de la littérature. » Pierre Foglia, La Presse

La Soeur de Judith

BOREAL

Chemin Saint-Paul

Rang de la dérive

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Tremblay, Lise. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Tremblay, Lise