A witty, irresistible debut novel from award-winning poet Madhur Anand about entangled desire in books, life and love.

This delightfully clever, artfully layered novel begins when the author of a popular science book attends a literary festival, where she strikes up a friendship with a charismatic novelist. This novelist's recent book is an experiment: a novella that was written in English but published only in French translation—a language the novelist herself cannot read or understand. Moreover, the novelist has lost her original manuscript of the work. The scientist, who is fluent in French, impulsively offers to re-translate the novella back into English for the novelist. But as she embarks on this task, she is haunted by memories, theories and queries—especially about a long-ago passionate affair with a French lover—that insert themselves into the translation process, troubling it, then fraying it, and finally pulling it apart at the seams. As the scientist desperately tries to complete her task before losing control of her well-organized life, both the novelist and the long-ago French lover pop up in the present day, further complicating both life and art.

Madhur Anand's poetry has appeared in several literary magazines across Canada and the US including The Malahat Review, Grain, CV2, The New Quarterly, Interim and Room. Her poetry has also been anthologized in The Shape of Form: Creative Writing about Science and Mathematics and nominated for a Pushcart prize. Formerly a professor at Laurentian University in Sudbury, she now holds the Canada Research Chair in Global Ecological Change at the University of Guelph. Her award-winning research in the areas of ecological modelling, forest ecology, and conservation ecology has been widely published in several leading international journals. She serves on the editorial board of Community Ecology, Research Letters in Ecology and the Open Conservation Biology journal.

Madhur Anand's profile page