Read more
From French Ontario to the anarchist camps of California, three young women come of age in a tumultuous 21st century.
About the author
Born and raised in Ottawa, Ontario,
Stéfanie Clermont travelled throughout Canada and the United States, working at a wide variety of jobs, before settling in Montreal in 2012.
The Music Game, her first book, won the prestigious Ringuet Prize of the Quebec Academy of Arts and Letters, the Quebec Arts Council's prize for a new work by a young artist, and the Adrienne Choquette Prize for short stories. It was a finalist for the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal and was included in Le Combat des livres, the French-language counterpart of Canada Reads.
JC Sutcliffe is a writer and translator. Her most recent translations include
Worst Case, We Get Married by Sophie Bienvenu and
Mama's Boy Behind Bars by David Goudreault. She has lived in England, France and Canada.
Summary
From French Ontario to the anarchist camps of California, three young women come of age in a tumultuous 21st century.
Foreword
Print run 5,000 Co-op available Advance reader copies North American TV & radio campaign National print campaign Online and social media campaign Campaign targeting feminist and LGBT media Indies Introduce nomination
Additional text
Praise for The Music Game
"Let’s hear it for an indie sleaze-era novel ... class issues, deep friendship, betrayal, a gender transition and anti-globalization protests. You know, just ~Millennial~ stuff!"
—NYLON
"The Music Game seems to ask us to return to those vital conversations about the way we have been hurt and about wanting to make things better, even if the room to do that may feel so out of reach. It’s a book that allows us to escape our reality while also somehow facing it head on. It's a reminder of our fundamental interconnectedness, of the loss that still cuts through us every day, and, more than anything else, of the necessity of hope."
—Open Book
"[An] audacious, honest, and liberating masterpiece ... The Music Game is about relationships, yet also about all the ways we desperately try to escape reality ... anyone who’s ever experienced depression or anxiety will find healing through Stéfanie’s loyal and beautiful ways of describing the inexplicable. She allows for contradiction; depth and lightness meet in a disturbing but cathartic way."
—Apt613
"The Music Game's structure is what sets it apart. Each chapter tells a self-contained story from the point of view of someone within Sabrina’s inner circle, be it a long-lost friend or a neighbour ... Clermont’s reflection on activism is skillfully nuanced, exploring both the hopefulness and cynicism that often come with political engagement."
—The McGill Tribune
"Stéfanie Clermont confronts the futility of the pursuit of sex, rent, and art with a rare clarity. The Music Game may well show us how to absolve ourselves by sheer force of yearning alone."
—Paige Cooper, Scotiabank Giller Prize-nominated author of Zolitude
“Here is a clear, burning voice whose subject is uncertainty. Everything is precarious for young people in The Music Game: income, love, gender. This is a moving and melancholy portrait of a generation of urban people who have been promised absolutely nothing for sure.”
—Russell Smith, Scotiabank Giller Prize-nominated author of Confidence
"Stéfanie Clermont’s multi-vocal book The Music Game is a compelling debut, precise and vivid in its observations and deeply attuned to the emotional cadences of its characters. By turns, funny, tender, and harrowing, The Music Game tells a story that feels both urgent and elegiac."
—Faye Guenther, author of Swimmers in Winter
"The Music Game is a bruising, jubilant, prismatic book, inhabiting the space where short stories and the novel overlap. Clermont writes with clear-eyed insight, imbuing her characters and their knotty relationships with dazzling vitality, even as many of them question whether they can bear to stay in this world or not."
—Helen Chau Bradley, author of Personal Attention Roleplay
Praise for the French edition of The Music Game
"A remarkably well constructed first book."
—La Presse (Montreal)
"The reader isn't spared the characters' suffering, and what shines is a new voice, one we're eager to hear more from."
—Publishers Weekly (Quebec supplement)
"In The Music Game the moments when everything shifts are numerous and hold readers breathless because we know that nothing can be taken for granted, that a sudden reversal in fate or the unexpected reaction of a female character can turn everything upside down at the turn of a page."
—Les libraires (Montreal)
"The voices Clermont creates make themselves heard as a rich, unusual pleasure of the sort one rarely encounters."
—Revue Spirale (Montreal)
"In spite of the lack of ambition of its rather directionless characters, Clermont’s collection proves to be a work of a breadth that is quite unusual in the Quebec literary landscape."
—Revue Liberté (Montreal)
"The Music Game has a very contemporary vibe in which the desire to live opens a makeshift path between apathy and revolt. Precision, lyricism, deep feeling: a hit for the youth of the 2010s."—Grazia (France)
