“It’s the Summer of 1967.

The sun shines brightly over Boundary lake, a holiday haven on the US-Canadian border. Families relax in the heat, happy and carefree. Hours tick away to the sound of radios playing ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ and ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’.  Children run along the beach as the heady smell of barbecues fills the air.

Zaza Mulligan and Sissy Morgan, with their long, tanned legs and silky hair, relish their growing reputation as the red and blond Lolitas. Life seems idyllic.

But then Zaza disappears, and the skies begin to cloud over..”

I am absolutely delighted to welcome you to my stop on the Boundary blog tour.  And it’s UK publication day for author Andrée A. Michaud and the lovely folk at No Exit Press.  You lucky people can purchase a copy of Boundary in either hardcover or eBook format today!

To celebrate Boundary’s release in the UK I have a fantastic guest post from Andrée A. Michaud to share with you.  So without further ado, I’ll hand to Andrée…

What’s Boundary about

 People often ask me, ‘what’s Boundary about?’. It’s never easy to answer what a fictional book is about without betraying its secrets. Novels are complete by themselves and if you try to summarise them, to rend their color in just a few words, you run the risk of missing the essential; that is to say, the atmosphere.

Having said which, I will play the part and try my best to do just that, and maybe, just maybe, I will pick up some new readers along the way:

Boundary, as its title suggests, is first and foremost a book about barriers, all kinds of barriers, between men and women, childhood and adulthood, countries, cultures, languages and, finally, between good and evil.

Boundary is also a book about the loss of paradise, of all paradises in fact, when men, who stupidly want to make those paradises better, slowly transform them into hell. It’s what happens in Boundary. The place is an Eden from which men are finally and inevitably expelled, because men are not able to survive in such a wild place, the violence of which mirrors their own, and because Nature always, in the end, chases away those who are spoiling or destroying her very essence.

In this sense, Boundary is a book about wilderness – its strength, its beauty, its self-reliance – and about wildness – of men, of war, of men when war destroy them and drives them mad. But I want to be clear here: there is no war in Boundary, except the war raging between a man and himself and his memories.

Boundary is also book about the Sixties, about the culture of those years, about the wind of liberty which was then blowing, about the evolution of mentalities, the timid apparition of feminism in the daily life of the middle class, etc. In a way this novel is, for me, full of nostalgia, because the Sixties were the years of my childhood, the most beautiful years of my life, before the death of my father, when I was ten. Andrée, one of the narrators, witnesses this period, and for her the summer of ‘67 is a time of transition, the moment at which she will have to say goodbye to her innocence. In a way, you could say that Boundary is a coming-of-age novel, in which the little Andrée learns the meaning of the words death, absence, forever.

Finally, Boundary is a book about solidarity, and about the frailty of solidarity when drama touches a little community in which everyone knows everyone, and when the person at the origin of that drama could be anyone: your father, your brother, your son or your neighbour.

***

I am so excited to read Boundary.  Even more so after reading this fabulous guest post from the author.  There are so many interesting themes running through the story that make it sound just my sort of read.  I’m excited, are you?

(c) Marianne Deschenes

Andrée A Michaud is a two-time winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction (Le Ravissement in 2001 and Bondrée in 2014) and the recipient of the Arthur Ellis Award and the Prix Saint-Pacôme for best crime novel for Bondrée, as well as the 2006 Prix Ringuet for Mirror Lake (adapted for the big screen in 2013). As she has done since her very first novel, Michaud fashions an eminently personal work that never ceases to garner praise from critics and avid mystery readers alike. In 2010, her thriller Lazy Bird, set to the rhythms of jazz, was published by Les Éditions du Seuil in France, as part of the Point Noir Collection.