Shortly after the first referendum on Quebec separation, four people in their forties encounter each other in Ile d’Or, the town where all of them grew up. The novel is about gold and greed and renewal and hope. About people who emerge from a frontier existence into the society of the late twentieth century with the need to discover how their contemporary lives connect with their pasts: how growing up in a mining town in northern Quebec in the 1930s through 1950s shaped who they are today. They do this with the hope that confronting the past may better equip them for moving on with their stalled lives. Their need to be reconciled with themselves can only be satisfied through a reconciliation with the community in which they grew up. A vibrant novel that deals with language, community and the politics of Canada as it explores the hardscrabble life of a mining town—a company town—and the psychological fallout for the adults and children who live there.

Mary Lou Dickinson grew up in northern Quebec and migrated to Toronto via Montreal and Michigan. She studied Arts at McGill University and Library Science at University of Toronto before discovering workshops and residencies in creative writing. Her fiction has been published in the University of Windsor Review, Descant, Waves, Grain, Northern Journey, The Fiddlehead, Impulse, Writ and broadcast on CBC Radio. Her writing was also included in the anthology, We Who Can Fly: Poems, Essays and Memories in Honour of Adele Wiseman. Inanna published a book of Dickinson's short stories, One Day It Happens, in 2007, and her first novel, Ile D'Or, in 2010, both to excellent reviews in The Globe and Mail, among others.

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• Winner, IPPY Bronze Medal Winner for Regional Fiction

If you open Ile d'Or expecting to find the likes of Rita MacNeil and her quaint crew of crooning miners, you will be disappointed. Ile d'Or reads nothing like Cape Breton's Men of the Deeps and its folksy repertoire of mining tales. With a storytelling style that skillfully combines the fragility of the human condition with the rock-hard reality of life in a northern mining town, Dickinson threads together the lives not only of miners and their bosses, but also the larger social fabric of a Quebec mining town on the heels of the province's failed 1980 independence referendum. Dickinson's writing style is slow and deliberate. Like the best writers this country produces, nobody rushes Munro, Ondaatje or Gowdy and nobody is going to rush Mary Lou Dickinson. Fortunately, she doesn't write like any of them (okay, maybe a little like Munro), but something like Bonnie Burnard. Both dig deep into the subject of partnerships, relationships, memory (not nostalgia) and ordinary lives.