The Alley Cat

First published in Quebec in 1981, Beauchemin's highly acclaimed comic masterpiece of storytelling follows in the tradition of the great novels of the 19th century. When Florent Boissonneault comes to the aid of an accident victim, his life changes forever. One onlooker, the powerful and sinister Egon Ratablavasky, comes to haunt his ambitions and dreams, lurking behind his every opportunity, success, and failure. Finally, obsessed by a need to free himself, Florent discovers how to fight back.

Yves Beauchemin was born in Noranda, Quebec, in 1941. After receiving his licence ès lettres in French and art history at the University of Montreal in 1965, he taught literature at the Collège Garneau and Laval University, then worked as an editor in a Montreal publishing firm while beginning to contribute essays and stories to magazines and newspapers. In 1969 he accepted a position as a researcher at Radio-Québec.

Beauchemin’s first novel, The Bamboozled (1974), won the Prix France-Québec, his second novel, The Alley Cat (1981), became the all-time best-selling novel in Quebec literature and has been translated into fifteen languages, and his third novel, Juliette (1989), won the Prix Jean Giono.

In his fiction Beauchemin is a detached but caring observer of the contemporary world around him. The panoramic canvases of his novels capture the teeming life of the streets, reflecting their author’s appreciation of such great nineteenth-century writers as Balzac and Dickens, Dostoevsky and Gogol.

Yves Beauchemin reside in Langueuil, Quebec.