Maria Chapdelaine

A farm at the edge of the forest north of Lake St John, cleared by hand from the bush; three men want Maria, and the winter decides. Hémon came from France at thirty-one, worked as a farmhand in this country, wrote the book in a year and was killed by a train at thirty-two, before it was published. It became the national novel of French Canada, and the voice of the land at the end is not a metaphor. Fifty-six plates of northern forest painting, from Munch to Gallen-Kallela, give the bush and the winter the same weight they carry in the story.