Boundary
CBC Books | | Posted: September 13, 2017 2:30 PM | Last Updated: June 7, 2019
Andrée A. Michaud, translated by Donald Winkler
In the deep woods of the Maine borderlands, the legend of huntsman Pete Landry is still told around cottage campfires to scare children — a tragic story of love, lust and madness. During the early summer of 1967, inseparable teenage beauties Sissy Morgan and Zaza Mulligan wander among the vacation cottages in the community of Boundary, drinking and smoking and swearing — attracting the attention of boys and men. First one, and then the other, goes missing, and both are eventually found dead in the forest. Have they been the victims of freak accidents? Or is someone hunting the young women of Boundary? And if there is a hunter, who might be next? The Summer of Love quickly becomes the Summer of Fear, and detective Stan Michaud, already haunted by a case he could not solve, is determined to find out what exactly is happening in Boundary before someone else is found dead.
A story of deep psychological power and unbearable suspense, Andrée A. Michaud's award-winning Boundary is an utterly gripping read about a community divided by suspicion and driven together by primal terror. (From Biblioasis)
Boundary won the Governor General's Award for French-language fiction in 2014.
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From the book
My parents lives began with me, and I couldn't conceive that they had a past. The little girl posing in black and white on photos stored in a Lowney's chocolate box that served as a family album didn't at all look like my mother, no more than the boy with the shaved head chewing on a wisp of hay near a wooden fence looked like my father. Those children belonged to a universe that had nothing to do with the adults whose immutable image kept the world on its steady course. Florence and Samuel Duchamp's entire purpose in life was to provide, to protect, and to impose limits. They were there and would always be there, familiar figures for whom I was the only reason to be alive, along with Bob and Millie. / It was only that summer, when things got out of hand and I began to lose my bearings, that I came to see that the frailty of those little people shut up in the Lowney's chocolate box had endured down the years, along with the fears buried at the heart of every childhood, fears that resurface as soon as it becomes clear that the world's solidity rests on a foundation that can be swept away with a single gust from an evil wind.
From Boundary by Andrée A. Michaud, translated by Donald Winkler ©2017. Published by Biblioasis.