In a bathtub in a rooming house in Montreal in 1980, a woman tries to imagine a new life for herself: a life after a passionate affair with a man while falling for a woman, a life that makes sense after her deep involvement in far left politics during the turbulent seventies of Quebec, a life whose form she knows can only be grasped as she speaks it. A new, revised edition of a seminal work of edgy, experimental feminism. With a foreword by Eileen Myles.
Gail Scott is an experimental novelist from Montreal. The Obituary was a 2011 finalist for Le Grand Prix du Livre de la Ville de Montréal. Other works include My Paris and Main Brides. Spare Parts Plus 2 is a collection of stories and manifestoes, and her translation of Michael Delisle’s Le Déasarroi du matelot was shortlisted for the Governor General’s award. Scott co-founded the critical French-language journal Spirale (Montréal).
'Heroine is a daring, sensual, important book. It’s wild, sometimes raw, sexual, solitary. A literary gem. A feminist classic'.
"The texture of Heroine — dense with the images, smells, and sounds of the city — is the texture of the world absorbed through all the pores of a woman's body."
'Heroine is more a work of reading than of writing, it is all studio, by which I mean it’s something fabulously risky and alive. It’s literature and the possibility of it.'
'The prose is photographically precise and masterfully cadenced, but its construction is so light and fluid that it almost resembles free association'.