From one of Canada's premier literary writers, a fabulous new novel set in Toronto, Paris and Tunisia, exploring passion and desire in a dazzling prose style. Beginnings never tell enough. It may not be as simple as two strangers sitting on a park bench in Paris on a sunny afternoon in the spring of 1975 when a handsome young man asked a red-haired woman: "Vous-etes au pair?" Two foreigners in Paris. What begins as a tentative exchange soon develops into an affair. When Amy and her son travel to Tunisia for the summer, Habib mysteriously appears. The Jasmine Man is a deeply considered novel that addresses issues of art, culture and colonialism as it explores the realms of memory and desire. With compassion and wit, Tostevin charts the repercussions of this affair, ultimately subverting the conventions of traditional novels of passion. Amy's relationship with Habib is one of self-discovery, and she is forced to make difficult decisions about her future. Exploring contemporary issues of language, identity and family life, this elegantly written novel is sure to appeal to all those who fell in love with Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient or Marguerite Duras' The Lover.

Lola Lemire Tostevin is a bilingual Canadian writer who works mainly in English. She is the author of three novels, eight collections of poetry, numerous pieces of short fiction, and a collection of literary essays and criticism. She has translated into English the work of many writers, including Anne Hébert, Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau, Nicole Brossard, and Paule Thévenin, and she has translated into French Michael Ondaatje’s Elimination Dance. Her novel Frog Moon was translated into French and two of her collections of poetry, Color of Her Speech and ’sophie, were translated into Italian. Her most recent novel, The Other Sister, was published in the fall of 2008.Tostevin has taught creative writing at York University, Toronto, and served as writer-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario, London. She is presently preparing a second collection of literary essays and is working on a series of short fictions.

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