Description
It’s a long way from a basement apartment in a Montréal suburb to a new life on a fictional planet, but that’s the destination our unnamed narrator has set his sights on, bringing readers with him on an off-beat and often hilarious journey. Along the way, he writes poems, buys groceries at the dollar store, and earns minimum wage at a dead-end supermarket job. In between treatments for his cystic fibrosis and the constant drip-drip-drip of disappointment, he dreams of a new life on Tatouine, where he’ll play Super Mario Bros and make sand angels all day. In the meantime, he gets by with daydreams of a better life.
Praise for Tatouine:
“One of my favourite Canadian books of all time.” Neil Smith, author of Boo
“A joy to read!” Shelagh Rogers, CBC’s The Next Chapter
“A novel of inventive, self-deprecating humour.” Jade Colbert, The Globe and Mail
“A wonderful combination of entertaining and heartbreaking.” Rebecca Hussey, Book Riot
“Réhel gives the reader a front-row seat to a baroque and often hilarious interiority – one that highlights the complexity and tragedy of the human condition, while playfully revealing the capacity of the human mind for turning the struggles of existence, large and small, into a source of amusement. […] In addition to the often-dark humour, Réhel has a poet’s eye for rhythm, repetition, and stark imagery that thankfully isn’t lost in the exceptional translation by Katherine Hastings and Peter McCambridge.” Dean Garlick, Montreal Review of Books
“Jean-Christophe Réhel’s Tatouine is every bit as remarkable as QC Fiction’s earlier offerings […] wit and resignation dance cheek-to-cheek.” Marcie McCauley, Buried in Print
“I’m completely smitten with the narrator of Tatouine, thanks to his deadpan humour, dreamy melancholy, vivid imagination, and a heart as big as the hole in Percé Rock. As heroes go, the guy rivals any Jedi knight.” Neil Smith, author of Boo
About the author:
Poet, novelist, and screenwriter Jean-Christophe Réhel is the author of six collections of poetry and two novels. His first novel, Tatouine, published orginally in French under the title Ce qu’on respire sur Tatouine, won the prestigious Prix littéraire des collegiens in 2019. Its English translation, published by QC Fiction in 2020 was longlisted for Canada Reads in 2021. His second novel, La blague du siècle, came out in 2023 to great acclaim. The English translation, All Kidding Aside, was published by QC Fiction in 2025. Réhel’s TV series, L’air d’aller, won the Prix des étudiants à Canneseries in 2023. His most recent book is All Kidding Aside. He lives in Montréal.
About the translators:
Originally from Ireland, Peter McCambridge holds a BA in modern languages from Cambridge University, England, and has lived in Quebec City since 2003. The former founder and editor of QC Fiction, McCambridge’s translation of Eric Dupont’s La Fiancée américaine, Songs for the Cold of Heart was shortlisted for both the 2018 Giller Prize and the 2018 Governor General’s Award for Translation. It has now been published worldwide, outside of Canada, by HarperCollins. His translation of Eric Dupont’s novel Rosa’s Very Own Personal Revolution won the 2023 Governor General’s Award.
After immigrating to Canada from the U.K., Katherine Hastings spent ten years in Ontario before moving to Montréal, where she completed a degree in modern languages at McGill University. She has worked as a Québec-based translator and copyeditor since 1995 and has translated two novels for QC Fiction, The Unknown Huntsman and The Electric Baths, both by Jean-Michel Fortier.
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