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Stand By Me meets Knausgaard: an explosive 1980s coming-of-age in a hardscrabble Quebec mining town.
Thetford Mines, an asbestos-mining town in Quebec, summer 1986. Nine-year-old Steve Dubois and ten-year-old Poulie revel in the joys of friendship, roaming free on their BMXs, building forts, reading Tintins, filling their disaster scrapbook, sharing escapades on the high slag heaps and landscapes that are part forest, part lunar. The two inseparable friends spend their days in idleness and innocence. But 1986 is a year rife with tragedy, from the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion to one closer to home, one that will rock Thetford Mines, and Steve, to the core. Five years later, we find Steve consumed by his obsession: to recreate his vanished paradise.
Wielding precise and sensual language, Sébastien Dulude tells the story of a fragile and volatile youth in a working-class dream that is losing momentum. Asbestos is cast from a rare ore that could only emerge from Quebec’s hinterlands.
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Born in Montréal in 1976, Sébastien Dulude grew up in the Mitchell neighbourhood of Thetford Mines from the age of six to sixteen. A writer and publisher, he is the author of three poetry collections and an essay about typography and poetry. Asbestos is his first novel.
Pablo Strauss’s recent translations of fiction from Quebec include Horsefly, What I Know About You, The Second Substance, Aquariums, Fauna, and The Dishwasher. He is a three-time finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for translation. Pablo grew up in Victoria, BC, and has lived in Quebec City for two decades.
