Fiction. Shortly after the first referendum on Quebec separation, four people in their forties encounter each other in ILE D'OR, the town where all of them grew up. The novel is about gold and greed and renewal and hope. About people who emerge from a frontier existence into the society of the late twentieth century with the need to discover how their contemporary lives connect with their pasts: how growing up in a mining town in northern Quebec in the 1930s through 1950s shaped who they are today. They do this with the hope that confronting the past may better equip them for moving on with their stalled lives. Their pasts include alcoholism, scandal, suicide, ethnic and linguistic tensions as well as violence and divorce. Their need to be reconciled with themselves can only be satisfied through a reconciliation with the community in which they grew up. One component of their shame relates to the languages they and their parents spoke, or did not speak, and how those languages were related to power and class. This particular shame and how they deal with the language issues now as adults runs as a leitmotif throughout the manuscript.

Author City: Toronto, ON CAN

Mary Lou Dickinson grew up in northern Quebec and has lived for many years in Toronto, where she worked as a crisis counsellor. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from McGill University and a Master in Library Science from the University of Toronto. Her fiction has been published in the University of Windsor Review, Descant, Waves, Grain, Northern Journey, Impulse, Writ and broadcast on CBC Radio. Her writing was also included in the anthology, We Who Can Fly: Poems, Essays and Memories in Honour of Adele Wiseman. Mary Lou's first book of short stories, One Day it Happens, was published by Inanna Publications in May 2007.

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