In the spring of 2008 Elena, who recently moved to Montreal with her seven year old daughter, Sharon, finds a job in a retail store on Sherbrooke Street. She meets Mahfouz working in his family's fast food outlet on The Main. Partially as an antidote to her chronic loneliness, partially influenced by Sharon's spontaneous affection for him, Elena commits to a deepening relationship. Together the three of them enjoy a wonderful spring. That summer, however, Mahfouz doesn't return from a visit to Cairo, and his father is picked up and held indefinitely for unknown charges on undisclosed evidence. Elena and Mahfouz, no longer in any contact with each other, must separately come to terms with their historical situation, and prepare for a future shaped by forces they struggle to understand.

Michael Springate enjoys writing as a life-long discipline calling for independent research and reflection. He is the author of the novel The Beautiful West & The Beloved of God (Guernica Editions, 2014), translated and published as L’engrenage des Apparences (Les éditions Sémaphore 2017). A selection of his produced scripts will soon be published as Revolt/Compassion : Six Scripts for Contemporary Performance (Guernica Editions, 2019). He wrote the screenplay for Carolyn Combs’ debut feature, Acts of Imagination (2006), as well as for her current film, Bella Ciao!, which will premiere in November, 2018. Michael is a past Artistic Director of Playwrights Workshop Montreal, Prairie Theatre Exchange in Winnipeg, Factory Theatre in Toronto, and Dramaturg and Artistic Associate with Full Circle: First Nations Performance, in Vancouver. He has taught acting, directing, and play development at both Simon Fraser and Concordia Universities. He was invited as Researcher/Lecturer to Gwangju National University in South Korea. He is a founding member of the film group Commercial Drive Productions, and is on the Board of Directors of both the Vancouver Latin American Cultural Centre and Paloma Housing Co-op.

Michael Springate's profile page

This is an exceptional novel, set in Montreal and Egypt, that brings out the frightening turns in the tribal wars being played out all over the world. The author’s historical awareness amply supports a deeply personal and local story, giving it a global resonance.

author of The Fourth Canvas and Recovering Rude

I love the patient rhythm which creates in meticulous dialogue a mosaic of three Montreal families, their roots elsewhere. With reverberations in history, politics and philosophy, this is a humane, civil, and eminently Canadian world, yet the intensity and inevitability of the ending are overwhelming.

Leanore Lieblein

The best and bravest book I’ve read in years. The Beautiful West & The Beloved of God is on par with the moral voices of Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn.

Charles Orloski

The Beautiful West & The Beloved of God is an amazing novel, frightening in its honesty, timely in its observations. Some of the scenes of Michael Springate’s unflinching picture of Western imperialism will leave you breathless.

Charles R. Lawson, Emeritus Professor of Literature at American University