Songs for the Cold of Heart by Éric Dupont

The two girls threw snowballs at each other and slid along Rue Fraserville's steep sidewalks, breaking into a song for the cold of heart as they revelled in winter's arrival right down to the very last snowflake. Now she would have to work on getting the ban lifted on visiting the Lamontagne house.

Nothing is so foreign to the heart of a tormented lover than seeing the pain of absence disappear, as though her heart had been fuelled by this angst ever since she first laid eyes on Madeline from behind the willow hedge. Published in Canada as Songs for the Cold of Heart by QC Fiction. And we end with her son Gabriel, another ladies’ man in the family, who falls in love with a woman he follows to Berlin and discovers unexpected connections there to the Lamontagne family that re-frame the entire course of the events in the book.Īn unholy marriage of John Irving and Gary Shteyngart with the irresistible whimsy of Elizabeth McCracken, The American Fiancée is a big, bold, wildly ambitious novel that introduces a dynamic new voice to contemporary literature. We meet his daughter, Madeleine, who opens a successful chain of diners using the recipes from her grandmother, the original American Fiancée, and vows never to return to her hometown. until they finally confront the secrets of their complicated pasts.īorn on Christmas, Louis Lamontagne, the family’s patriarch, is a larger-than-life lothario and raconteur who inherits his mother’s teal eyes and his father’s brutish good looks and whose charms travel beyond Quebec, across the state of New York where he wins at county fairs as a larger-than-life strongman, and even in Europe, where he is deployed for the US Army during World War II.

Their complicated family dynamic-as dramatic as Puccini’s legendary opera, Tosca-will propel their rise, and fall, and take them around the world. Over the course of the twentieth century, three generations of the Lamontagnes will weather love, passion, jealousy, revenge, and death. In this extraordinary breakout novel-a rich, devastatingly humorous epic of one unforgettable family-award-winning author Eric Dupont illuminates the magic of stories, the bonds of family, and the twists of fate and fortune to transform our lives.

Songs for the Cold of Heart by Éric Dupont