Elle
by Douglas Glover

• Ottawa Public Library, Canada
• Edmonton Public Library, Canada
  

Elle is a lusty, subversive riff on the discovery of the New World, the moment of first contact. Based on a true story, Elle chronicles the ordeals and adventures of a young French woman marooned on the desolate Isle of Demons during Jacques Cartier's ill fated and last attempt to colonise Canada.
The novel brilliantly reinvents the beginnings of this country's history: what Canada meant to the early European adventurers, what these Europeans meant to Canada's original inhabitants, and the terrible failure of the two worlds to recognise each other as human. In a carnal whirlwind of myth and story, of death, lust and love, of beauty and hilarity, Glover brings the past violently and unexpectedly into the present. Mysterious, mystical and thoroughly original, Elle charts the magical zone of delirium where races, genders, languages, and ideas converge - everything the history books leave out.

Douglas Glover is the author of eight works of fiction, including Sixteen Categories of Desire, A Guide to Animal Behaviour, a Governor General's Award finalist, and The Life and Times of Captain N. Elle won the Governor General's Literary Award 2003.