• Age: 15 to 18
• Grade: 10 to 12

The Grandfathers is a reflection on the passage of generations in a rural community. Based on the life of the author's grandfather, the novel explores the mockery and sorrow of old age: in memories and poverty, in the beauty of yesteryear and its present mutilation. The old man's saving grace is his attachment to his farm and its inhabitants, his tenacity to the natural cycle of the seasons and crops, and the fecundity animal and human generations. In this lyrical novel, dreams and folk wisdom interweave to create a universe of fantastic beings in a rich but simple setting.
Published in English.

Born in Montreal in 1951 to English and French Canadian parents, MARC PLOURDE spoke mostly English as a child at home, but was schooled in French. His first poems were written and published in French before he was seventeen, but thereafter he began writing in English, strongly influenced by Alden Nowlan and others (at nineteen he made a solo pilgrimage to New Brunswick specifically to meet Nowlan.) Traces of a French sensibility nevertheless colour his poems, which are preoccupied with people and the places they inhabit. Plourde's gifts were recognized early on: a first collection of poems, Touchings, was published by Fred Cogswell's Fiddlehead Poetry Books in 1970, followed by The White Magnet (poems, stories, and a one-act play) with D.C. Books in 1973, and a collection of stories, The Spark Plug Thief, in 1976. Thereafter the poet fell silent for two decades, turning instead to translating Quebecois writers, notably Gaston Miron, whose selected poems, Embers and Earth, he co-tran

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