Description

FINALIST for the FOREWORD INDIES PRIZE FOR LITERARY FICTION

NOVEMBER 2025.

In the tumult of the pandemic, a writer hopes the quarantine might provide the space to finally complete a decades-old project on her travels throughout Latin America. But an unexpected disease suddenly clouds her eyes. Poetic, inventive, introspective, Between the Island and the Turtle follows the author’s shifts in vision from past to present, shedding light on what it is to witness suffering and illness, ultimately questioning what literature can do in times of crisis.

Karine Rosso is the author of Histoires sans Dieu (2011), Mon ennemie Nelly  (2019), Interpellations(s): Enjeux de l’écriture au “tu” (2018) and, alongside Nicholas Dawson, Nous sommes un continent: Correspondance mestiza (2021). A cofounder of the feminist bookstore L’Euguélionne, Rosso is a professor of literature at the Université du Québec à Montréal.

Reviews and praise

“Writing in the immersive second person, Rosso entwines her reader with her unnamed narrator’s experiences of temporal, spatial, bodily, and ideological dislocations and dissociations throughout. . . . Rosso’s writing (and Anita Anand’s translation) is at once concrete and abstract, decisive and searching, theoretical and cinematic.” Paisley Conrad, Montreal Review of Books

“With her precise and deeply moving writing, the author (. . .) takes us on a journey between the worlds that shape her identity—North and South America.”—Malia Navia, Châtelaine

“A hybrid text bridging autofiction and social reflection that explores the role of literature in times of crisis.” —Audrey-Anne Blais, La Presse

“This novel is about loss, about what breaks within you and around you, about commitment and the inevitable exhaustion looming around the bend; it’s about the power (or lack thereof) of literature. It is a raised fist, a courageous act of resistance.”— Dominique Lemieux, Les libraires