The Weight of Snow

by Christian Guay-Poliquin, David Homel (Translator)

Overview

A badly injured man. A nationwide power failure. A village buried in snow. A desperate struggle for survival. These are the ingredients of The Weight of Snow, Christian Guay-Poliquin’s riveting new novel. After surviving a major accident, the book’s protagonist is entrusted to Matthias, a taciturn old man who agrees to heal his wounds in exchange for supplies and a chance of escape. The two men become prisoners of the elements and of their own rough confrontation as the centimetres of snow accumulate relentlessly. Surrounded by a nature both hostile and sublime, their relationship oscillates between commiseration, mistrust, and mutual aid. Will they manage to hold out against external threats and intimate pitfalls?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781772012569
Publisher:	Talonbooks, Limited
Publication date:	04/20/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Christian Guay-Poliquin was born just north of the U.S. border in Saint-Armand, Quebec, in 1982. He believes the art of the narrative is grounded in the demands and details of daily life, situated in a world ripe with experience. He is currently developing a doctoral thesis on the hunting narrative. His two first novels, Running on Fumes and The Weight of Snow, were both published in English by Talonbooks, and in French by La Peuplade.
Christian Guay-Poliquin was born in Saint-Armand in 1982. He is now developing a thesis project on the hunting narrative and also works in renovation. The pencil on his ear serves to mark his measures as much as it does to record his ideas. Running on Fumes is his first novel, followed in 2019 by The Weight of the Snow, both published by Talonbooks.
Award-winning author and literary translator David Homel also works as a journalist, editor and screenwriter. He was born in Chicago in 1952 but left at the end of the tumultuous 1960s and continued his education in Europe and Toronto before settling in 1980 Montreal. He worked at a variety of industrial jobs before beginning to write fiction in the mid-1980s. His eleven novels to date have been translated into several languages and published around the world.

Editorial Reviews

"It’s not easy to make such a simple story both profound and compulsively readable, but Guay-Poliquin pulls it off in this literary page-turner."
—Montréal Review of Books

"There are four hundred times more descriptions of snow than you'd find in the average novel, yet that is precisely the right amount."
—New York Magazine

"There are four hundred times more descriptions of snow than you'd find in the average novel, yet that is precisely the right amount."
—New York Magazine

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"It’s not easy to make such a simple story both profound and compulsively readable, but Guay-Poliquin pulls it off in this literary page-turner."
—Montreal Review of Books

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"Guay-Poliquin has somehow managed to turn descriptions of a long black highway through the prairies and a snow-filled landscape seen through a cabin window into an engrossing world where nothing monumental needs to happen in order to keep his readers – at least this one – hooked."
—Patty Osborne, Geist magazine

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"A claustrophobically tense novel of deceptive simplicity, its stark plot and captivating language cuts into readers like an icy wind."
—Speculative Fiction in Translation

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"With no word wasted, brisk chapters that are often less than two pages keep the reader clipping along. The harsh winter is an interesting environment to explore in a post-apocalyptic world, rather than the tired and overused wind-swept desert." —Keith Cadieux, Winnipeg Free Press

"His prose has the boiled-wool sensibility of far northern climes: a refreshing dearth of adjectives, characters who inquire after each other with variations on "What's with you?" and an almost-hallucinogenic attentiveness to the textural nuances of snow."
—Chelsea Edgar, Seven Days

From the Publisher

"A claustrophobically tense novel of deceptive simplicity, its stark plot and captivating language cuts into readers like an icy wind."

Speculative Fiction in Translation

"There are four hundred times more descriptions of snow than you'd find in the average novel, yet that is precisely the right amount." —New York Magazine

New York Magazine

"It’s not easy to make such a simple story both profound and compulsively readable, but Guay-Poliquin pulls it off in this literary page-turner."

Montréal Review of Books

"It’s not easy to make such a simple story both profound and compulsively readable, but Guay-Poliquin pulls it off in this literary page-turner."

Montréal Review of Books