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Celebrate more than 150 years of Canada with 150 books.
(From the Canadian Encyclopedia)
Kamouraska is a psychological gothic romance based on an actual murder committed in 1839 in the village of Kamouraska, Qué, by a female ancestor of the author. The action takes place in Elizabeth's mind on the night of her second husband's impending death, transmuting the facts surrounding an earlier crime of passion into a haunting study of internalized guilt and the search for freedom.
Attending Jérome Rolland's sickbed, she revisits in dream and memory her stifling childhood; her escape into an unhappy marriage to the squire of Kamouraska; an affair with Dr Nelson, with whom she plotted to kill her husband; her trial and acquittal; and her subsequent quest for respectability, leading to her second, equally stifling marriage. A fragmented juxtaposition of first- and third-person narration communicates Elizabeth's inner turmoil in an interior monologue with feminist overtones. Claude Jutra's film Kamouraska (1973) captures the poetic quality of Hébert's writing.
(From Canada Channel)
Anne Hébert was a novelist and poet born in Ste-Catherine-de-Fossambault, Québec, August 1, 1916. She was a descendant of French-Canadian historian François-Xavier Garneau and died in Montréal, Québec, January 22, 2000. Hébert was influenced by her father, an author and Quebec civil servant, and her cousin, poet Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau. She moved to Paris in the 1950s. Her major novels are Kamouraska (1970), based on a 19th century murder, Les enfants du sabbat (1975) (Children of the Black Sabbath), Héloise (1980), about a Parisian vampire, and Les fous de Bassan (1982) (In the Shadow of the Wind), about a double rape and murder. Her poetry includes Les songes en equilibre (1942) and Le tombeau des rois (1953).
Gildiner was born in 1948 in Lewiston, New York, and came to Canada in 1970. After completing an M.A. and a Ph.D. in psychology, she established her private practice, and worked as a clinical psychologist for more than twenty-five years. She also writes journalistic pieces for various newspapers and wrote a monthly column for Chatelaine. Gildiner’s childhood memoir Too Close to the Falls (1999) was a New York Times bestseller and on the Globe and Mail’s bestseller list for over a year. In 2010, she published a sequel, After the Falls, also a bestseller, and in 2014 published the final instalment of the trilogy Coming Ashore. She lives in Toronto, Ontario. Gildiner lives in Toronto, Ontario, with her husband and three sons, and was on a masters rowing team that rows competitively worldwide.