Charles the Bold
Possibly the greatest novel published in Canada in 2004 — the first in a historic series.
It’s as if Dickens or Balzac — or Rohinton Mistry — had decided to write the book that summed up life in east-end Montreal. This is the first volume of a quartet that has taken Quebec by storm, selling over forty-five thousand copies.
On the very first page, we meet Charles Thibodeau being born. It’s 1966 and the rest of Montreal is more excited by the fact that a new subway system is opening, but his birth is a big event for Charles’s parents and for their working-class neighbours.
Sadly, Charles’s mother dies when he is four, her funeral interrupted by War Measures Act soldiers…