ONE OF BOOK RIOT'S "20 MUST-READ HORROR BOOKS YOU'VE NEVER HEARD OF"

Simon and Marie can’t seem to have a baby. And so they flee the city for an idyllic village, where things will certainly be better. But the town is gloomy, even hostile -- things haven’t been the same since the factory closed down and a broadcast antenna was erected. Now there are no birds singing, and people have started disappearing.

Matthieu Simard is the author of eight novels. He has been called one of the most promising Québécois authors of this generation. He currently lives in Montreal.

Matthieu Simard's profile page

Pablo Strauss is the translator of twelve works of fiction, several graphic novels, and the screenplay of one feature film, White Dog (2022). He is a three-time finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for translation for The Country Will Bring Us No Peace (Coach House Books, 2020), Synapses (Talonbooks, 2019), and The Longest Year (House of Anansi, 2017). The Dishwasher, his translation of Stéphane Larue’s Le plongeur, won the 2020 Amazon Canada First Novel Award. He has published essays, reviews, and translations in Granta, Geist, The Literary Review of Canada, The Globe and Mail and The Montreal Review of Books. Pablo grew up in Victoria, BC, and has made his home in Quebec City for fifteen years.

Pablo Strauss' profile page

• Short-listed, Governor General’s Literary Award Translation

"Simard wrote one of those books that perfectly suits itself: all of the elements, the prose, the characters, style, the structure, and the gambits work for the feelings and experience it aims to express, right through to the beautiful and haunting ending." -P.T Smith, Montreal Review of Books

"The entire narrative is superbly controlled and imaginatively translated, leading us to an ending which, though signaled early on, is still a shock." —The Irish Times

"With an ending that is an absolute shocker, this novel is everything today’s Literature has to be and is often lost in commercial choices where quality is compromised. It is a revelation, a dark jewel. A haunting presence." -The Opinionated Reader

"A novel about silence, tinged with the fantastic, The Country Will Bring Us No Peace sneaks the brutality of grief into your imagination." -Dana Hansen, Hamilton Review of Books

"The novella delivers gut-and-heart-wrenching twists in a language which, throughout, retains a distinctive, elegiac lyricism expertly conveyed in this English translation by Pablo Strauss. This is a special book." -to the end of the word

"The Country Will Bring Us No Peace is an outstanding book that will resonate with lovers of great storytelling as well as with those who enjoy work happening in the interstitial space between literary fiction and psychological horror." -Volume 1 Brooklyn