Thunder and Light

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A01=Marie-Claire Blais
Author_Marie-Claire Blais
CanLit
Category=FB
challenging
Elmear McBride
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for fiction
literature in translation
longlisted author
magical
marginalized stories
poetic prose
powerful
Quebec literature
Quill & Quire
reverie
sexual oppression
starred review
stream of consciousness
ten-novel cycle
Virginia Woolf
women writers
women's literature
works in translation

Product details

  • ISBN 9781487004255
  • Weight: 240g
  • Dimensions: 139 x 203mm
  • Publication Date: 19 Sep 2019
  • Publisher: House of Anansi Press Ltd ,Canada
  • Publication City/Country: CA
  • Product Form: Paperback
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The second volume in the beloved novelist Marie-Claire Blais’s prize-winning novel cycle — acclaimed as one of the greatest undertakings in modern Quebec fiction — reissued in a handsome A List edition.

Originally published in 2001, Thunder and Light is the second volume in Marie-Claire Blais’s prize-winning Soifs series, hailed as one of the greatest undertakings in modern Quebec fiction. Powered by its characters’ gripping exploration of the world’s dark corners, the novel is a teeming microcosm in which boundaries collapse and the extremes and contradictions that animate our times are reconciled.

Blais locks us directly into the consciousness of her characters, many of whom we met in her previous novel, These Festive Nights, and many that she derives from actual news stories: Jessica, a seven-year-old attempting to beat the world record as the youngest pilot to cross the continent; Nathanaël, a teenager on death row for killing his favourite teacher; Our Lady of the Bags, a modern-day Joan of Arc who lives among Manhattan’s skyscrapers and follows the voices in her head; and Caroline and Jean-Mathieu, aging artists who are fighting to come together again. One character’s thoughts or actions have consequences for another 3,000 miles away who is a complete stranger to the first.

This is an intricate house of cards, delicately but expertly constructed, that shocks us in its perversity and familiarity, ultimately finding hope and redemption in the most human and basic forms of art.

MARIE-CLAIRE BLAIS (1939-2021) was the internationally revered author of more than twenty-five books, many of which have been published around the world. In addition to the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, which she won four times, Blais was awarded the Gilles-Corbeil Prize, the Médicis Prize, the Molson Prize, and several Guggenheim Fellowships. Marie-Claire Blais divided her time between Florida and Quebec. Nigel Spencer is Marie-Claire Blais’ longtime translator and a three-time Governor General's Literary Award winner. He lives in Montreal, Quebec.

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