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. The Obituary (New York, Nightboat, 2012; Coach House, 2010), a ghost story set in a Montreal triplex, was a 2011 finalist for Le Grand Prix du Livre de la Ville de Montreal. Other novels include My Paris (Dalkey Archive), about a sad diarist in conversation with Gertrude Stein and Walter Benjamin in late 20th century Paris, Main Brides and Heroine. Spare Parts Plus 2 is a collection of stories and manifestoes. Essays are collected in Spaces Like Stairs and la theorie, un dimanche (translated as Sunday Theory from Belladonna, NY, 2013). Scott's translation of Michael Delisle's Le D'asarroi du matelot was shortlisted for the Governor General's award in 2001. Scott co-founded the critical French-language journal Spirale'(Montreal) and is co-editor of the New Narrative anthology: Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (Toronto: Coach House, 2004). She is currently completing a memoir based in Lower Manhattan during the early Obama years.

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"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." -Eileen Myles, The Paris Review

"Heroine sounds like Montreal, mingling French and English, often in the same sentence, the same breath. The city vibrates in these pages, as Gail immerses us in the Plateau of the seventies." - Montreal Review of Books

"Heroine is a daring, sensual, important book. It’s wild, sometimes raw, sexual, solitary. A literary gem. A feminist classic." -Melissa Bull, Maisonneuve

"The prose is photographically precise and masterfully cadenced, but its construction is so light and fluid that it almost resembles free association." -Lettres Québécoises

"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." -The Village Voice