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The Harmattan Winds

by

Translated from by

Published: April 1, 2025

Paperback ISBN: 9781962770224

SKU: N/A Category: Tags: ,
This item will be released on April 1, 2025.
$19.00

Hidden in the reeds floating on a pond next to the highway, a woman finds a baby bobbing in a shopping basket. Adopted by the Francoeurs, Hugues remains an outsider in his semi-family. At the same time, Habรฉkรฉ is adopted by a Canadian family and brought to Quebec after his own family dies of famine in Ethiopia. On the margins of their small town, the boys become sworn brothers, searching for their roots, desperate to return to exile, to a paradise called Ityopia. Narrated by the bold and imaginative voice of Hugues, Sylvain Trudelโ€™s prize-winning debut novel is at times serious and at times fantastical. In their childโ€™s world, where Hugues and Habรฉkรฉ havenโ€™t yet learned the prejudices of adults, they embark on adventures, digging holes to China and building fantastical contraptions to take them to far off places, like their hero, explorer Roald Amundsen. Trudel writes with uncommon wit, and The Harmattan Winds is a feast of wordplay, rife with puns and wonder โ€“ย perfect for devotees of Ali Smith, classic adventure novels like The Adventures of Huckleberry, and John Knowlesโ€™s A Separate Peace.

We are very grateful to the Quรฉbec Government Office in New York for supporting this title.

 

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Praise

What a beautiful story! And what a fervor . . . This first novel is a beautiful bouquet of emotions, sometimes serious and sometimes cheerful, composed with constant care.
Rรฉginald Martel, La Presse
Put this book on your rereading or reading list, along with Flaubertโ€™s Sentimental Education.
Pierre Yergeau
Sylvain Trudel reinvents language. A series of true characters thunder within him that vibrate with the whole range of emotions possible.
Mรฉlanie Vincelette
A story that comes straight from [Sylvain Trudelโ€™s] heart of a child, without the filter of reason, that results in a work that is frenzied, vibrant, and charming. His writing has been compared to that of Rรฉjean Ducharme, Emile Ajar, sometimes to Marc Favreauโ€™s clown character Sol, and to Jacques Poulin. For me, it is the paintings of Chagall, oddly, that come to mind.
La Presse
A touching story, poetic at times, that, in drawing on the naivety of children, allows us to refresh our perception of reality and to use this innocence as an anti-rust to unseal our eyes of the force of habit.
Guy Cloutier, Le Soleil
This tale is told in what may at first seem like a foreign language, probably because it isโ€”one as foreign as anything utterly original, unconstrained by rules or logic. Nonetheless, if you allow it to pour over you, or into you, it soon becomes as lucid as if it were actually your native tongue, the one you understood (and may have been doomed to forget) before you were even born.
Doon Arbus
Sylvain Trudel has peerless insight into a child's speech, imagination, and supple sense of wonder. With The Harmattan Winds, he has blessed us with the gift of childhood.
Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books
The Harmattan Winds is a beguiling fairy tale of a book, indebted as much to Bellowโ€™s Henderson as it is to the immortal Peter Pan, a slender novel of the great adventure that is growing up.
Rumaan Alam
The Harmattan Winds was a wonderful surprise. It's a lovely book and also a little fierce. Full of provocative ideas and adventures, and that one-of-a-kind voice of Hugues is a constant delight. So vivid, so quirky, so oddly believable. A very endearing book.
Robert Plunket
The Harmattan Winds is an unusual coming-of-age tale imbued with undercurrents of magic,โ€‹ mystery, and tragedyโ€‹ .โ€‹ . . Hugues and Hakรฉbรฉ command empathy . . . Absorbed with the act and art of storytelling, the book spins strikingโ€‹ conceits out of everyday occurrences: a dinner ofโ€‹ vegetables and mashed potatoes is reimagined as a castle wall under assault; a strict family is compared to cowardlyโ€‹ scorpions. In the powerful novel The Harmattan Winds, young men struggle against their circumstances, seeking connectionsโ€‹ with and acceptance from others.โ€‹
Foreword Reviews, starred review
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