Translated from French, Falling Shadows brings to life both the internal conflict and imagined environmental realities of a post-apocalyptic world where no electricity exists and survivors abound. This third title of an award-winning trilogy takes place in a wilderness that could be Quebec, BC, or the Maritimes. Told in first person by a narrator who is not named, a man travels to find his family, who have retreated into the wilderness to survive at their hunting camp. He meets and adopts as his companion a young child survivor, Milo. After reuniting with his family, they realize that they might not fit in after all, and they leave to go to the coast, where there is rumoured to be wind power. The book ends tragically and without a concrete resolution. Although this book does not require reading the first two volumes, the reader would benefit from reading them. As literary fiction, Falling Shadows has something for every reader: character development, progressive plot and action, thematic questions, and rhetorical strength. Reading in French and English for comparative purposes would be a compelling project for a senior Literature or IB class. There are no explicit references to Indigenous Peoples. Teachers could introduce this text in a senior Science or Social Science class to discuss human and environmental interaction.

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Source: Books BC - BC Books for Schools

Christian Guay-Poliquin was born back when the environmental stakes were limited to a hole in the ozone and acid rain. Though his books refer to the codes of post-apocalyptic fiction, their ambition is not to tell another end-of-the-world story. Instead, they bring us face to face with the strengths and fragile quality of human relations. His trilogy of novels Running on Fumes (2013), The Weight of Snow (2016, winner of the Governor General’s Award Literary Award for French-Language Fiction), and Falling Shadows have been published in several languages around the world.

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David Homel was born in Chicago in 1952 and left that city in 1970 for Paris, living in Europe the next few years on odd jobs and odder couches. He has published eight novels, from Electrical Storms in 1988 to The Teardown, which won the Paragraph Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction in 2019. He has also written young adult fiction with Marie-Louise Gay, directed documentary films, worked in TV production, been a literary translator, journalist, and creative writing teacher. He has translated four books for Linda Leith Publishing: Bitter Roase (2015), (2016), Nan Goldin: The Warrior Medusa (2017) and Taximan (2018). Lunging into the Underbrush is his first book of non-fiction. He lives in Montreal.

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