Audrée Wilhelmy

Audrée Wilhelmy is the author of the novella Oss, a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for French-language fiction, and Les Sangs, winner of France’s Sade Award and a finalist for the Prix France-Québec and the Québec Booksellers Award. The Body of the Beasts is Wilhelmy’s third novel and her first to be translated into English. Born in Cap-Rouge, Quebec, she lives in Montreal.

Website: audreewilhelmy.com
Twitter: @audreewilhelmy

A vivid and atmospheric novel… Wilhemy’s writing is strange, beautiful, and wild.” — Alix Ohlin

FESTIVAL BOOK

The Body of the Beasts

The Body of the Beasts is an imaginative tour de force, a beautifully described portrait of a world that exists outside of words; an uninhibited and erotic novel that, in the tradition of Quebecois Boreal Gothic, explores our humanity – and our animal nature. This startling novel tells the story of the Borya family minding a lighthouse and living in isolation. Their lives are altered when young Osip, peering from the lighthouse gallery he has made his home, sees a woman, Noé, arrive in Sitjaq – her dress scant, her skin curiously scarred, and her manners mysterious and wild. Noé bears a child, Mie, to Sevastien-Benedikt, the eldest son on whose hunter-gathering the Borya family depends. She lives in a cabin on her own and covers the walls with drawings that allude to her mysterious life. The family’s entrenchment in nature is enthrallingly conveyed in young Mie’s sensuous ability to borrow at will the body of mammals, birds, fish, and insects. When her own awakening body starts to intrigue her, she asks her uncle Osip to “teach me human sex.”