The Future - (Biblioasis International Translation) by Catherine LeRoux (Paperback)

About the Book

"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."--

Book Synopsis

Winner of Canada Reads 2024 - Longlisted for the 2025 Dublin Literary Award - Longlisted for the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction - One of Tor.com's Can't Miss Speculative Fiction for Fall 2023 - Listed in CBC Books Fiction to Read in Fall 2023 - One of Kirkus Reviews' Fall 2023 Big Books By Small Presses - A Kirkus Review Work of Translated Fiction To Read Now - One of CBC Books Best Books of 2023 - A CBC Books Bestselling Canadian Book of the Week

In an alternate history in which the French never surrendered Detroit, children protect their own kingdom in the trees.

In an alternate history of Detroit, the Motor City was never surrendered to the US. Its residents deal with pollution, poverty, and the legacy of racism-and strange and magical things are happening: children rule over their own kingdom in the trees and burned houses regenerate themselves. When Gloria arrives looking for answers and her missing granddaughters, at first she finds only a hungry mouse in the derelict home where her daughter was murdered. But the neighbours take pity on her and she turns to their resilience and impressive gardens for sustenance.

When a strange intuition sends Gloria 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. A richly imagined story of community and a plea for persistence in the face of our uncertain future, The Future is a lyrical testament to the power we hold to protect the people and places we love--together.

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."


About the Author

Catherine Leroux is a Quebec novelist, translator and editor born in 1979. Her novel Le mur mitoyen won the France-Quebec Prize and its English version, The Party Wall, was nominated for the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize. The Future won CBC's Canada Reads 2024, received the Jacques-Brossard award for speculative fiction and was nominated for the Quebec Booksellers Prize. Catherine also won the 2019 Governor General's Literary Award for her translation of Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien. Two of her novels are currently being adapted for the screen. Her latest book, Peuple de verre, a speculative novel about the housing crisis, came out in April 2024. She lives in Montreal with her two children.

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.