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Archipelago Books

The Harmattan Winds

The Harmattan Winds

by Sylvain Trudel, translated from the French by Donald Winkler

$19.00
$19.00
Available as E-Book French Literature
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Written with uncommon wit, The Harmattan Winds is a feast of wordplay, rife with puns and wonder – perfect for devotees of Ali Smith, classic adventure novels like The Adventures of Huckleberry, and John Knowles’s A Separate Peace.

Hidden in the reeds floating on a pond next to the highway, a woman finds a baby bobbing in a shopping basket. Adopted by the Francoeurs, Hugues remains an outsider in his semi-family. At the same time, Habéké is adopted by a Canadian family and brought to Quebec after his own family dies of famine in Ethiopia. On the margins of their small town, the boys become sworn brothers, searching for their roots, desperate to return to exile, to a paradise called Ityopia.

Narrated by the bold and imaginative voice of Hugues, Sylvain Trudel’s prize-winning debut novel is at times serious and at times fantastical. In their child’s world, where Hugues and Habéké haven’t yet learned the prejudices of adults, they embark on adventures, digging holes to China and building fantastical contraptions to take them to far off places, like their hero, explorer Roald Amundsen.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781962770224
Pages: 172
Publication Date:

Praise

This tale is told in what may at first seem like a foreign language, probably because it is—one as foreign as anything utterly original, unconstrained by rules or logic. Nonetheless, if you allow it to pour over you, or into you, it soon becomes as lucid as if it were actually your native tongue, the one you understood (and may have been doomed to forget) before you were even born.
—Doon Arbus

Sylvain Trudel has peerless insight into a child's speech, imagination, and supple sense of wonder. With The Harmattan Winds, he has blessed us with the gift of childhood.
—Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books

The Harmattan Winds is a beguiling fairy tale of a book, indebted as much to Bellow’s Henderson as it is to the immortal Peter Pan, a slender novel of the great adventure that is growing up.
—Rumaan Alam

The Harmattan Winds was a wonderful surprise. It's a lovely book and also a little fierce. Full of provocative ideas and adventures, and that one-of-a-kind voice of Hugues is a constant delight . . . So vivid, so quirky, so oddly believable . . . a very endearing book.
—Robert Plunket

The Harmattan Winds is an unusual coming-of-age tale imbued with undercurrents of magic, mystery, and tragedy . . . Hugues and Hakébé command empathy . . . Absorbed with the act and art of storytelling, the book spins striking conceits out of everyday occurrences: a dinner of vegetables and mashed potatoes is reimagined as a castle wall under assault; a strict family is compared to cowardly scorpions. In the powerful novel The Harmattan Winds, young men struggle against their circumstances, seeking connections with and acceptance from others."—Forward Reviews, starred review

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