Michel’s village is a prison where life is to be feared and betrayed, where duty and hypocrisy are the fashion. His Native friend Kanak will help him escape, introducing him to nature, freedom and forbidden games, teaching him to balance spiritual needs and natural desires. But Michel’s relationship with Kanak shocks the village because it involves an Indian. For his crime, the clan forbids Michel from seeing Kanak again and sentences him to confinement and solitude. Worse yet: Michel will be sent off to school in the fall to forget his friend and everything he learned from him. Refusing to be exiled to some seminary to study Latin and learn amnesia, Michel invents new schemes to escape and be with his friend – or lets his imagination take him fishing with Kanak along the small river of snakes…

An actor, playwright and translator, Robert Lalonde is one of Quebec’s leading novelists. Seven Lakes Further North was a finalist for the 1993 Governor General’s Award for French fiction. His previous novels published in translation by Ekstasis Editions include The Ogre of Grand Remous, The Devil Incarnate, One Beautiful Day To Come and The Whole Wide World.

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A writer, translator, researcher and communications specialist, Jean-Paul Murray has translated ten books, including Betsi Larousse and Cowboy, novels by Governor General’s Award winner Louis Hamelin, The Biker Who Shot Me, by Michel Auger, and I Was a Killer for the Hells Angels, by Pierre Martineau. From 1995 to 1998, Mr. Murray was managing editor of Cité libre, a magazine founded by Pierre Trudeau, and was the magazine’s English translating coordinator from 1998 to 2000. Among his Cité libre translations are works authored by Allan Cairns, Jacques Hébert, Mordecai Richler, F. R. Scott, and Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

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