Tatouine

It's a long way from a basement apartment in a Montreal suburb to a new life on a fictional planet, but that’s the destination our unnamed narrator has set his sights on, bringing readers with him on an off-beat and often hilarious journey. Along the way, he writes poems, buys groceries at the dollar store, and earns minimum wage at a dead-end supermarket job. But not to worry—he is John McClane, he is the ghost of Obi-Wan Kenobi (with a bacteria he’s never heard of), he is Justin Timberlake...Meryl Streep...a grumpy George Clooney...In between treatments for his cystic fibrosis and the constant drip-drip-drip of disappointment, he dreams of a new life on Tatouine, where he’ll play Super Mario Bros and make sand angels all day. But in the meantime, he’ll have to make do with daydreams. Daydreams of normality, daydreams of surreal little catastrophes, daydreams of a better life. On Tatouine.

After immigrating to Canada from the U.K., Katherine Hastings spent ten years in Ontario before moving to Montreal, where she completed a degree in modern languages at McGill University. She has worked as a Quebec-based translator and copy editor since 1995. Her previous literary translations, The Unknown Huntsman and The Electric Baths, were both by Jean-Michel Fortier.

Originally from Ireland, Peter McCambridge holds a BA in modern languages from Cambridge University, England, and has lived in Quebec City since 2003. He runs Québec Reads and now QC Fiction, a new imprint of Quebec fiction in translation. His translation of Eric Dupont's La Fiancée américaine, Songs for the Cold of Heart, was shortlisted for both the 2018 Giller Prize and the 2018 Governor General's Award for Translation. It has now been published worldwide, outside of Canada, by HarperCollins. Jean-Christophe Réhel's début novel Ce qu’on respire sur Tatouine won Quebec's prestigious Prix littéraire des collégiens. It is his only novel to be translated into English so far; he is busy writing a second. Réhel is also the author of five poetry collections. He lives in Montreal.