Hebert, Anne in The Books Store

On a hot summer night in 1936, Olivia and Nora Atkins go for a stroll along the beach in Gaspé. They never return. When the body of one of them is washed ashore days later, the tiny community of Griffin Creek is electrified. The teenagers have been murdered. But by whom?

This attractive trade paperback collection of Anne Hébert's later novels includes some of the most accomplished and best loved fiction of her more than sixty-year career, and features an introduction by her dear friend and fellow acclaimed ex-pat writer, Mavis Gallant. This volume contains the beautiful and tragic Burden of Dreams, winner of the Governor General's Award for French fiction; Aurélien, Clara, Mademoiselle, and the English Lieutenant, a shimmering fable that captivates and dazzles with its simple beauty; Am I disturbing you?, the raw and chaotic tale of a distraught young woman, nominated for the Giller Prize; and A Suit of Light, Hébert's final novel about the realization of one family's dangerous dreams. A genuine Hébert treasure trove, Collected Later Novels celebrates one of Canada's most important writers.

Flora Fontages is a famous Parisian actress who has been in exile from her native Canada for twenty years. When word comes that her long-estranged daughter, Maud, has disappeared in Quebec City, she decides to return home, accepting the part of Winnie, the old crone in Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, at a local theatre. The visit unexpectedly turns into a devastating confrontation with her past and present illusions, as Flora finds she must come to terms with all the roles she has ever played in life, as actress, woman, mother, child, and lover.

Translated into seven languages, Kamouraska won the Paris book prize and was made into a landmark feature film by Claude Jutra. A classic of Canadian literature by the great Québecoise writer, Kamouraska is based on a real nineteenth-century love-triangle in rural Quebec. It paints a poetic and terrifying tableau of the life of Elisabeth d'Aulnières: her marriage to Antoine Tassy, squire of Kamouraska; his violent murder; and her passion for George Nelson, an American doctor. Passionate and evocative, Kamouraska is the timeless story of one woman's destructive commitment to an ideal love.

As Julien seeks liberation in Paris, he is haunted by the memories of a fateful autumn on the banks of the Duchesnay River near Quebec City. Until then, his reclusive childhood had been centered on his protective mother, Pauline, and his sister, Hélène. A wild and beautiful young woman captivates both Julien and Hélène. She promises them freedom, but her reckless urgings turn ecstasy and seduction into bitter tragedy.

Anne Hébert's final novel, originally published in French as Un Habit de lumière, is a story of dangerous dreams come true.

Rose-Alba Almevida, her husband Pedro, and her son Miguel live by modest means in a Paris apartment, but each, in their way, dreams of returning home to Spain to reclaim the honor and identity stripped of them by the immigrant struggle. Yet, where Pedro plans and saves for a vineyard plot to which he can retire, Rose-Alba and Miguel have vastly different dreams. For them Spain is an emotional state, where impulse and instinct prevail, where passions are untempered by foreign, unfamiliar values. When a mysterious stranger enters their lives and offers all that Rose-Alba and Miguel seek, the Almevida family is torn violently apart and their innocent dreams become the barbed weapons of their own destruction.