Description: "A woman seeking justice in an imagined Detroit discovers resilience and resistance where she least expects they will be found. Looking for answers, and her missing granddaughters, Gloria moves into the house where her daughter was murdered. A stranger in a Fort-Detroit neighborhood coping with the ongoing effects of racial and economic injustice, she finds herself surrounded by poverty, pollution, violence--as well as the resilience of the residents, in whose stubborn generosity and carefully tended gardens she finds hope. When a strange intuition sends her into the woods of Parc Rouge, where the city's orphaned and abandoned children are rumored to have created their own society, she can't imagine the strength she will find. Set in an alternate history in which the French never surrendered the city of Detroit, where children rule over their own kingdom in the trees and burned houses regenerate themselves, where rivers poison and heal and young and old alike protect with their lives the people and places they love, Catherine Leroux's The Future is a richly imagined story of community and a plea for persistence in the face of our uncertain future."--
Brief description:
Susan Ouriou is an award-winning fiction writer and literary translator with over sixty translations and co-translations of fiction, non-fiction, children's and young adult literature to her credit. She has won the Governor General's Literary Award for Translation for which she has also been shortlisted on five other occasions. Susan lives in Calgary, Alberta.
Review Quotes:
Praise for The Future
"The Future takes place in a post apocalyptic Detroit where everyone speaks French, which is super cool. It's the most magical response to the Lord of the Flies, you're going to meet a group of feral murderous children, whose meditations on life are so gorgeous, and absurd, and perverse that they are poetry. This wild group of children show us a model for a new society where everyone's dream life is equally important."
-Heather O'Neill, championing The Future on CBC Canada Reads
"This year's Canada Reads debates . . . have the theme 'one book to carry us forward.' As far as that rubric goes, Leroux's book seems like a natural fit."
--Steven Beattie, Toronto Star
"This atmospheric novel elevates disparate voices, drawing a complex picture of community-focused life beyond the family unit."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"At the heart of Catherine Leroux's extraordinary novel are the rising and vanishing lifeworlds nurtured by the Rouge River. The children of the Rouge are hunters and prey, remorseless, capable, indelible--'wildings' who are simultaneously custodians and seeds of the future. This ferocious, provocative dystopia is a dance of knives, and a deeply moving exploration of our decaying, adapting, ever-changing world."
--Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing
"An inherently fascinating, original, and carefully crafted novel that raises 'alternate history' science fiction to a high level of literary eloquence, The Future is unique, entertaining, and highly recommended."
--Midwest Review of Books
"A prescient narrative about motherhood and childhood that is alternately joyous and heartbreaking. Even with all the chaos, suffering, death, and despair of Fort Déeacute;troit, The Future provides a careful yet beautiful message of hope: one found in community, freedom, friendship, and forgiveness."
--Stacey May Fowles, Literary Review of Canada
"What makes The Future hopeful is its imagining of new, organic, co-operative (but not egalitarian) communities . . . savage but caring networks: small, local, and while living close to the edge still managing to get by. It may not be progress, but it is adapting to a vision of the future that hits pretty close to home."
--Alex Good, Toronto Star
"Leroux brings believability, poetry, and hopefulness to the dystopian narrative of Fort Détroit by steering clear of the many pitfalls of end-times novels . . . This permits the novel to imagine infinite small beginnings within the ending, and to show how destruction is balanced by the ever-present promise of creation."
--Bronwyn Averett, Montreal Review of Books
"The Future is so artfully crafted and gives us a poetic vision: despite terrible societal changes, an imaginative future of community and hope can still arise."
--MTL Blog
"Leroux immerses the reader in these children's world as they experience it . . . Trees and animals, wind and water speak to them in ways adults have forgotten . . . A paean to the wisdom that childhood possesses and the promise that it holds."
--Timothy Niedermann, Ottawa Review of Books
"While the setting of The Future is indeed dystopian--a ruined and toxic Fort Détroit--the story told here is one that won't leave you despairing."
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