A Good Life
by François Gravel
translated by Sheila Fischman
ISBN 9781896951515 | 5.5" x 8.5" | TPB | $22.95
Categories:Fiction - Literary, Translations
Purchase:Local Bookstores | mcnallyrobinson.com | amazon.ca | chapters.indigo.ca
Synopsis
This is Francois Gravel's greatest book to date. It is a charming novel about the rise of a French-Canadian Catholic family in Quebec. In the Depression, the Fillion brothers scrape together a living for their mother by taking scrap wood from the docks and selling it door-to-door as firewood. From this humble start, they develop their business: building first highchairs and selling them, then building and suplying Adirondack chairs to a local furniture store. As a market develops for their work in the years after the Second World War, they open their own furniture store, expand it and, over the course of the next thirty years, become successful merchants. Louis, the middle brother, is the leader of the family. A Good Life is his story, as it is in many ways a parable of the rise of Quebec's Francophone middle class.Reviews
"Sheila Fischman brings Francois Gravel's wonderful Fillion et Freres into English so adroitly that you aren't aware of reading a translation except for one thing: No one in English Canada seems capable of writing a novel from the point of view of a man whose life is defined by his obligations to his extended family and the world that encompasses it." — The Globe & Mail
Other Titles By This Author
