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).
"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 prose is photographically precise and masterfully cadenced, but its construction is so light and fluid that it almost resembles free association'.
'Heroine is a daring, sensual, important book. It’s wild, sometimes raw, sexual, solitary. A literary gem. A feminist classic'.
'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.'