The Future

(Paperback)

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Description

A woman seeking justice in an imagined Detroit discovers resilience and resistance where she least expects they will be found.

Looking for answers, and her missing granddaughters, Gloria moves into the house where her daughter was murdered. A stranger in a Fort-Detroit neighborhood coping with the ongoing effects of racial and economic injustice, she finds herself surrounded by poverty, pollution, violenceas well as the resilience of the residents, in whose stubborn generosity and carefully tended gardens she finds hope. When a strange intuition sends her into the woods of Parc Rouge, where the citys orphaned and abandoned children are rumored to have created their own society, she cant imagine the strength she will find.

Set in an alternate history in which the French never surrendered the city of Detroit, where children rule over their own kingdom in the trees and burned houses regenerate themselves, where rivers poison and heal and young and old alike protect with their lives the people and places they love, Catherine Lerouxs The Future is a richly imagined story of community and a plea for persistence in the face of our uncertain future.

Reviews

Praise forThe Future

At the height of her art, in a profound and teeming language marked by dialogues written in an invented patois, Catherine Leroux also gives us a glimpse of a world where nature flourishes against all odds, where legends are brought to life and where magical realism reigns.
La Presse, Montreal

The novel answers concrete questions: what happens after the end of the world ... Nothing can erase the survivors' traumatic memories but their hope persists and their present is full of intergenerational support and characters who create new ways of living among the ruins ... Catherine Leroux delivers a dazzling and original novel, above all a testament to the humanity and resilience of communities in the margins.
Etudes, Montreal

This poignant utopia captures how cities have souls, how they live and die, and how they sometimes miraculously rise from the dead. Far from the usual depressing post-apocalyptic novel, The Future is an exhilarating story in which Gloria, who relies on her daily horoscope to guide her, creates a future for her community that is finally able to find wonder after suffering loss.
Livres Hebdo, Montreal

Despite the suffering and horror, despite the precariousness, the novel is full of hope, light and goodness, and offers a vision of intergenerational healing.
Le Devoir, Montreal

[Leroux] expertly probes fallible, achingly human characters to form a portrait of a lost woman and examine the fragile forces that underlie a life. Gorgeously written, unsettling, and well worth the read.
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Leroux skillfully reveals the inner worlds of her achingly human characters and the intricate bonds that connect them to each other. Images from this beautiful and moving book will haunt readers.
Publishers Weekly

Leroux is a fearless writer who invokes fable with sure-footed confidence The end result is a novel that packs a stars density of rage and love into its pages, a delicate and unflinching look at the impossibilities of womanhood that is nothing short of incandescent. A testament to the power of fable and myth, Madame Victoria is a triumphant feat of storytelling.
Quill & Quire (starred review)

One of Canadas best and most adventurous writers.
Montreal Gazette

A unique and inherently fascinating approach to narrative storytelling, and ably translated into English by Lazer Lederhendler ... unreservedly recommended.
Midwest Book Review

Author Bio

Catherine Leroux is Qubec novelist, translator and editor born in 1979. Her novel Le mur mitoyen won the France-Quebec Prize and its English version, The Party Wall, was and Indies Introduce Pick and nominated for the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize. The Future received the Jacques-Brossard award for speculative fiction and was nominated for the Quebec Booksellers Prize. Catherine also won the 2019 Governor general award for her translation of Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien. She lives in Montreal with her two children.

Susan Ouriou is an award-winning fiction writer and literary translator with over sixty translations and co-translations of fiction, non-fiction, children's and young adult literature to her credit. She has won the Governor General's Literary Award for Translation for which she has also been shortlisted on five other occasions. Susan lives in Calgary, Alberta.