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list price: $17.95
edition:Paperback
also available: eBook
category: Fiction
published: Mar 2005
ISBN:9780889225206
publisher: Talonbooks

All That Glitters

by Martine Desjardins, translated by Fred A. Reed & David Homel

tagged: literary
Description

In 1914, Simon Dulac enrolls in a Canadian contingent of military police, a perfect cover for his real ambition—to comb the battlefields of Europe unhindered in his search for the legendary Templar treasure said to have been buried in Flanders in 1307. An inveterate and uncannily lucky gambler, Dulac encounters Nell, who has come to the trenches to practice suturing wounds, forbidden to nurses in her native England.
So skilled is Nell at her craft that she knits together torn and broken flesh with elaborate and beautiful embroidery, creating a rebus code which both reveals and conceals the most intricate secrets of her charges.
Haunted by the iron jealousy of their commanding officer, Dulac and Nell pursue their desires and risk everything in the greatest game of all.
Masterful, transgressive and erudite, Desjardins’s second novel constructs a narrative tapestry woven of the most elusive threads of meaning and signification.

About the Authors
Martine Desjardins was born in the Town of Mount Royal, Québec, in 1957. The second child of six, she started writing short stories when she was seventeen. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in Russian and Italian studies at the Université de Montréal, she went on to complete a master’s degree in comparative literature, exploring humour in Dostoevsky’s The Devils. She worked as an assistant editor-in-chief at ELLE Québec magazine for four years before leaving to devote herself to writing. Her first novel, Le cercle de Clara, was published by Leméac in 1997, and was nominated for both the Prix littéraires du Québec and the Grand Prix des lectrices de ELLE Québec in 1998. Talonbooks has published six translations of her more recent novels, including Maleficium, a tour de force short-listed for the 2010 Governor General’s Literary Award for French Fiction and Québec Prix des libraires. In her free time, Desjardins paints miniature models of ruins overgrown with vegetation.

A three-time winner of the Governor General’s Award for translation, and shortlisted for his 2009 translation of Thierry Hentsch’s Le temps aboli (Empire of Desire), Fred A. Reed has translated works by many of Quebec’s leading authors, several in collaboration with novelist David Homel, as well as works by Nikos Kazantzakis and other modern Greek writers. His most recent work, with David Homel, includes Philippe Arsenault’s Zora and Martine Desjardins’ The Green Chamber. Baraka Books will publish his translation, from Modern Greek, of Yannis Tsirbas’ Vic City Express in September. His latest book is Then We Were One: Fragments of Two Lives, an autobiographical essay, published in French by Fides Éditeur.


David Homel is a writer, journalist, filmmaker, and translator, and the author of nine novels. He has translated many French-language books into English and is a two-time recipient of the Governor General's Literary Award for Translation. He lives in Montreal.

Contributor Notes

Martine Desjardins
Born in the town of Mount Royal in Quebec, Martine Desjardins worked as an assistant editor-in-chief at ELLE Québec magazine for four years before leaving to devote herself to writing. Presently she works as a freelance rewriter, translator and journalist for L’actualité, an award-winning French-language current affairs magazine in Canada. Her first novel, Le cercle de Clara was published by Leméac in 1997, and was nominated for both the Prix littéraires du Québec and the Grand prix des lectrices Elle Québec in 1998. It has been published by Talonbooks in English as Fairy Ring.
Fred A. Reed
International journalist and award-winning literary translator Fred A. Reed is also a respected specialist on politics and religion in the Middle East. After several years as a librarian and trade union activist at the Montreal Gazette, Reed began reporting from Islamic Iran in 1984, visiting the Islamic Republic 30 times since then. He has also reported extensively on Middle Eastern affairs for La Presse, CBC Radio-Canada and Le Devoir. Reed is a three-time winner of the Governor General’s Award for translation.
David Homel
Award-winning author and literary translator David Homel also works as a journalist, editor and screenwriter. He was born in Chicago in 1952 but left at the end of the tumultuous 1960s and continued his education in Europe and Toronto before settling in Montreal in about 1980. He worked at a variety of industrial jobs before beginning to write fiction in the mid-1980s. His six novels to date have been translated into several languages and published around the world.

Awards
  • Short-listed, Governor General's Literary Award for French Fiction
Editorial Review

All That Glitters compels and disturbs, leaving us with questions about chance and fate, love and war.”
—Montreal Review of Books

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