The Unknown Huntsman

A strange and anonymous narrator, an unnamed village, an unsolved murder, a mysterious huntsman, and a wisdom tooth extraction gone terribly wrong. There’s no shortage of intrigue in this offbeat debut novel by Jean-Michel Fortier. A bewitching story full of dark humor and laugh-out-loud absurdity, The Unknown Huntsman is full of gossipy run-on sentences and snide remarks from the narrator. It reads like an allegory or dark adult fairy tale, and its motto could be: "If you don’t want answers, don’t ask questions."

Jean-Michel Fortier was born in Quebec City in 1987. He completed a master’s degree in literature at Université Laval before moving to Montreal, where he currently works as a copy editor. The Unknown Huntsman is his first book. 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 copyeditor since 1995. This is her first stab at literary translation, a field she looks forward to exploring further.