The Extraordinary Garden



by François Gravel
translated by Sheila Fischman

ISBN 9781896951539 | 5.125" x 7.625" | TPB | $21.95
Categories:Fiction - Literary, Translations

Purchase:Local Bookstores | mcnallyrobinson.com | amazon.ca | chapters.indigo.ca

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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
"... a clean, taut novel that slices through emotion ..."
— Quill & Quire
"... a collaboration of two geniuses. The result is a haunting and impossible to forget novel and a stunning testimony to the translator's art." — The Edmonton Journal
"An engrossing and insightful tale." — Canadian Literature
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