Catherine Leroux is the author of four highly praised novels and an innovative sequence of short stories. Her first novel, La marche en forêt, was a finalist for Quebec’s Booksellers’ Prize. Her bestselling second novel, Le mur mitoyen, won the France-Quebec Prize, and its translation, The Party Wall, was a finalist for the Giller Prize and longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Award. Leroux’s story sequence, Madame Victoria, won Quebec’s Adrienne Choquette Prize. The Future, championed by Heather O’Neill, won Canada Reads 2024 and was longlisted for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. The French original of The Future (L’avenir) won the Jacques-Brossard Prize and was a finalist for the Imaginary Horizons Prize and the Quebec Booksellers’ Prize. Catherine Leroux works as a translator and editor in Montreal. She was awarded the 2019 Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation.
“In haunting and elegiac prose, Catherine Leroux brings us into an eerie Montreal where the housing crisis has taken a disastrous turn. This is Leroux at her finest.” —Heather O’Neill
From the “unparalleled storytelling talent” (Lettres québécoises) behind Canada Reads–winning novel The Future comes a searing tour de force about a city beset by government conspiracies, strange disappearances, and fake news—and a rebellious journalist increasingly embroiled within the story she’s writing.
In near-future Montreal, where housing is a luxury that few can afford, rumours have begun to stir.
Sidonie, a trailblazing journalist, is the first to break the news of people disappearing off the streets—unsettling reports of unmarked government vehicles and attacks that have left encampment communities on edge. The story spreads like wildfire, thrusting Sidonie into the spotlight as the trusted mouthpiece for the most vulnerable population. But as public outrage and concern mount, Sidonie must decide how much she’s willing to risk to tell this story.
Eventually she finds herself on the other side of the mirror, within the walls of a new kind of institution whose residents may or may not be paid for their labour, and of which they may or may not be captive. In this context, Sidonie’s only escape is through her writing. As she reconstructs the events that led her here in her journal, she begins to realize that the page can provide an escape in more ways than one, and fiction, not truth, might set her free.
Funny, profound, and relentless, Republic of Glass is a singular exploration of the notions of home, survival, lies, and truth, and an exuberant plea for the imagination.
In the spirit of reconciliation, we acknowledge that we live, work and play on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Kainai, Piikani), the Tsuut’ina, the Iyarhe Nakoda Nations, the Otipemisiwak Métis Government of the Métis Nation within Alberta District 6, and all people who make their homes in the Treaty 7 region of Southern Alberta.
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