A badly injured man. A nationwide power failure. A village buried in snow. A desperate struggle for survival. These are the ingredients of The Weight of Snow, Christian Guay-Poliquin’s riveting new novel. After surviving a major accident, the book’s protagonist is entrusted to Matthias, a taciturn old man who agrees to heal his wounds in exchange for supplies and a chance of escape. The two men become prisoners of the elements and of their own rough confrontation as the centimetres of snow accumulate relentlessly. Surrounded by a nature both hostile and sublime, their relationship oscillates between commiseration, mistrust, and mutual aid. Will they manage to hold out against external threats and intimate pitfalls?

Christian Guay-Poliquin was born back when the environmental stakes were limited to a hole in the ozone and acid rain. Though his books refer to the codes of post-apocalyptic fiction, their ambition is not to tell another end-of-the-world story. Instead, they bring us face to face with the strengths and fragile quality of human relations. His trilogy of novels Running on Fumes (2013), The Weight of Snow (2016, winner of the Governor General’s Award Literary Award for French-Language Fiction), and Falling Shadows have been published in several languages around the world.

Christian Guay-Poliquin's profile page

David Homel was born in Chicago in 1952 and left that city in 1970 for Paris, living in Europe the next few years on odd jobs and odder couches. He has published eight novels, from Electrical Storms in 1988 to The Teardown, which won the Paragraph Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction in 2019. He has also written young adult fiction with Marie-Louise Gay, directed documentary films, worked in TV production, been a literary translator, journalist, and creative writing teacher. He has translated four books for Linda Leith Publishing: Bitter Roase (2015), (2016), Nan Goldin: The Warrior Medusa (2017) and Taximan (2018). Lunging into the Underbrush is his first book of non-fiction. He lives in Montreal.

David Homel's profile page

• Long-listed, The Sunburst Award

"His prose has the boiled-wool sensibility of far northern climes: a refreshing dearth of adjectives, characters who inquire after each other with variations on "What's with you?" and an almost-hallucinogenic attentiveness to the textural nuances of snow."
—Chelsea Edgar, Seven Days

"With no word wasted, brisk chapters that are often less than two pages keep the reader clipping along. The harsh winter is an interesting environment to explore in a post-apocalyptic world, rather than the tired and overused wind-swept desert." —Keith Cadieux, Winnipeg Free Press

"There are four hundred times more descriptions of snow than you'd find in the average novel, yet that is precisely the right amount."
—New York Magazine

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"It’s not easy to make such a simple story both profound and compulsively readable, but Guay-Poliquin pulls it off in this literary page-turner."
—Montreal Review of Books

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"Guay-Poliquin has somehow managed to turn descriptions of a long black highway through the prairies and a snow-filled landscape seen through a cabin window into an engrossing world where nothing monumental needs to happen in order to keep his readers – at least this one – hooked."
—Patty Osborne, Geist magazine

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"A claustrophobically tense novel of deceptive simplicity, its stark plot and captivating language cuts into readers like an icy wind."
—Speculative Fiction in Translation

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"It’s not easy to make such a simple story both profound and compulsively readable, but Guay-Poliquin pulls it off in this literary page-turner."
—Montréal Review of Books

"There are four hundred times more descriptions of snow than you'd find in the average novel, yet that is precisely the right amount."
—New York Magazine