As a way to draw visitors to their isolated fishing village on Quebec’s North Shore, the tourist bureau commissions a documentary film recreating life as it was lived there in the 1940s and 50s. To gather material for the project, the filmmaker is sent in search of Rose Brouillard, now an old woman but raised on an island just offshore by Onile, a local fisherman. Rose is finally tracked down in Montreal, where she lives a solitary life fogged by one of the inevitabilities of old age – failing memory.

“Dorothea” (the name Rose gives the young filmmaker), takes her back to scenes from her childhood and invites her to tell her story as they go, and so we return to a past assembled from Rose’s fragmented recollections.

Structured as a series of short cinematic “takes,” this novel about recovering both personal and shared histories is told in a polyphony of voices, including Rose herself (as a child, an adolescent, and in her old age), the sexton of the village church, his three female cousins, an elderly neighbour, a villager who passes time on the harbour wall, and Rose’s long-deceased mother. We see fishermen on the docks with their nets, hard-at-work villagers with shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow, leafy gardens, and tree-lined streets, all recreated during Rose’s reminiscences. The problem is that many of these scenes are invented, not real. Does that matter? Or are the stories we tell more important?

Jean-François Caron was born in La Pocatière, Québec, in 1978. In 2005, he became editor-in-chief of Voir Saguenay-Alma, where he spent five years as a cultural correspondent and columnist. In 2010, he assumed responsibility for communications and audience development at Théâtre La Rubrique.Currently editor-in-chief of the journal of the Quebec Union of Writers, he also belongs to the editorial board of Lettres québécoises. Caron is the author of The Keeper’s Daughter and two books of poetry.He holds a master’s degree in literary studies from the Université du Québec and lives and works in the relative isolation of Sainte-Béatrix, Québec.

Jean-François Caron's profile page

W. Donald Wilson holds a degree in modern languages from Trinity College, Dublin, where he also completed a Ph.D. in French literature. He has taught at universities in the West Indies, the United Kingdom, and at the University of Waterloo. In 2011 and 2013, two of Wilson’s translations were long-listed for the Best Translated Book Award in the United States, and in 2013 he was a finalist for the French-American Foundation translation prize.

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“Sheer joy to read.” – Châtelaine

“Jean-François Caron has given us one of the most accomplished novels of the season … The writing is certainly poetic, but it is also funny and surprising, precise and fluid, brilliant and arresting.”
– La Presse

“The disjunction between appearance and reality is a skillful reflection of the documentary, and Sainte-Marée, itself. This interesting book deconstructs and interrogates the processed and polished history that other Quebec novels sometimes present, and does this in such a way that both form and content are working toward the same goal.”
– Literary Review of Canada

"Throughout the novel, Caron combines short, poetic fragments and trailing sentences, and Wilson skilfully recreates this lovely style in his translation."
– Québec Reads

"Caron’s tangled timeline, sharp transitions, and multitude of perspectives force the reader to experience the story in a specific way … Within this conceptual form, Caron’s writing is gorgeous and evocative; every scene is described in rich and tangible detail."
– Québec Reads