All That Glitters
by Martine Desjardins
translated by David Homel & Fred A. Reed
In 1914, Simon Dulac enrolls in a Canadian contingent of military police, a perfect cover for his real ambition?to comb the battlefields of Europe unhindered in his search for the legendary Templar treasure said to have been buried in Flanders in 1307. An inveterate and uncannily lucky gambler, Dulac encounters Nell, who has come to the trenches to practice suturing wounds, forbidden to nurses in her native England.
So skilled is Nell at her craft that she knits together torn and broken flesh with elaborate and beautiful embroidery, creating a rebus code which both reveals and conceals the most intricate secrets of her charges.
Haunted by the iron jealousy of their commanding officer, Dulac and Nell pursue their desires and risk everything in the greatest game of all.
Masterful, transgressive and erudite, Desjardins’s second novel constructs a narrative tapestry woven of the most elusive threads of meaning and signification.
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Martine Desjardins
Born in the town of Mount Royal in Quebec, Martine Desjardins worked as an assistant editor-in-chief at ELLE Québec magazine for four years before leaving to devote herself to writing. Presently she works as a freelance rewriter, translator and journalist for L’actualité, an award-winning French-language current affairs magazine in Canada. Her first novel, Le cercle de Clara was published by Leméac in 1997, and was nominated for both the Prix littéraires du Québec and the Grand prix des lectrices Elle Québec in 1998. It has been published by Talonbooks in English as Fairy Ring.
Fred A. Reed
International journalist and award-winning literary translator Fred A. Reed is also a respected specialist on politics and religion in the Middle East. After several years as a librarian and trade union activist at the Montreal Gazette, Reed began reporting from Islamic Iran in 1984, visiting the Islamic Republic 30 times since then. He has also reported extensively on Middle Eastern affairs for La Presse, CBC Radio-Canada and Le Devoir. Reed is a three-time winner of the Governor General’s Award for translation.
David Homel
Award-winning author and literary translator David Homel also works as a journalist, editor and screenwriter. He was born in Chicago in 1952 but left at the end of the tumultuous 1960s and continued his education in Europe and Toronto before settling in Montreal in about 1980. He worked at a variety of industrial jobs before beginning to write fiction in the mid-1980s. His six novels to date have been translated into several languages and published around the world.
?All That Glitters compels and disturbs, leaving us with questions about chance and fate, love and war.”
? Montreal Review of Books
