A Village Reinvented

Some two dozen fiction titles from Quebec and francophone Canada are published in English annually. Such translations are most likely to be issued by small presses such as BookThug, Coach House, Talonbooks and Véhicule, as well as the somewhat larger House of Anansi. Their small press origins can result in a skew toward the experimental—not a bad thing, in my opinion, but when the other genre published in significant numbers tends toward fiction trading in sepia-tinted nostalgia, it leaves something of a gap in the anglophone reader’s knowledge of Québécois literature.

This is intriguing context for reading Jean-François Caron’s second novel, The Keeper’s Daughter, brought into English in an idiomatic translation by W. Donald Wilson. Caron, born in 1978 in the picturesque village of La Pocatière, Quebec, has worked as an editor, journalist and freelance writer, and has previously published two novels and two collections of poetry.

Caron had called...