Fleeing the city at the beginning of the pandemic, two families are thrown together in a century-old country house. Winter seeps through the walls, the wallpaper is peeling, and the mice make their nest in the piano. Without phones and Internet, they turn to the outdoors, where a new language unfolds. Five children become tiny explorers, discovering nature and its treasures, while the adults reconnect with something greater than themselves.

In To the Forest, Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette considers existence and death in a celebration of small places and the natural world. A house built on a foundation of gravestones, the local handyman Clark Kent, a mystery woman long dead that no one wants to talk about: Barbeau-Lavalette brings to life the oddities of a place and a cast of colourful neighbours who have lived unusual lives. (From Coach House)

Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette is a Montreal-based novelist, screenwriter and director. Her novel La femme qui fuit — inspired by her own grandmother's life as an artist — was later translated into English and titled Suzanne. It won the Prix des libraires du Québec and was shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for French-language fiction. Her other books include Je voudrais qu'on m'efface and Embrasser Yasser Arafat.

Rhonda Mullins is a writer and translator living in Montreal. She won the 2015 Governor General's Literary Award for French-to-English translation for Jocelyne Saucier's Twenty-One Cardinals. And the Birds Rained Down — her translation of Saucier's Il pleuvait des oiseaux — was defended on Canada Reads 2015 by Martha Wainwright and was shortlisted for a Governor General's Literary Award, as were Mullins's translations of Louis Carmain's Guano, Élise Turcotte's Guyana, Hervé Fischer's The Decline of the Hollywood Empire and Julie Demers's Little Beast.

Mullins also translated Barbeau-Lavalette's novel La femme qui fuit from French to English, which was titled Suzanne and defended by Yanic Truesdale on Canada Reads 2019.