Elle.

All historical novels should open with this admission from the author: “I have tried to mangle and distort the facts as best I can.” Based loosely on historical fact, Douglas Glover’s Elle received critical and popular acclaim when it was first released in 2003, selling over 25,000 copies and winning the Governor General’s Award for Fiction. This re-release comes on the heels of Glover’s most recent honour, the Timothy Findley Award for Male Writer in Mid-Career from the Writers’ Trust of Canada.

In Elle, Glover sticks to the main outline of an actual historical event: a French colonizer, Jean-François de La Rocque, the Sieur de Roberval, abandoned his niece (our heroine), her lover, and her nurse on the Isle of Demons. A baby was born and everyone, except for Elle, died in the New World. But, true to his word, Glover fills the holes that history has left with imagination, myth, sex, death, and despair—and not an ounce of truth.

Glover’s Elle is abandoned by her uncle after being caught having sex with her “fiancé” on the long journey from France to the New World. The General (as Elle calls him) casts off a pregnant Elle and her nurse onto the vacant Isle of Demons. Richard, the Comte d’Épirgny and Elle’s lover, follows in a fit of misguided gallantry. No one in this motley crew is prepared to survive on a deserted island just off the coast of Canada. Elle, however, somehow manages to survive even when everyone else does not.            

Past, present, and future come together for Elle, alone on the Island of Demons. She loses herself between new and old, past and future, God and nothing, and reality and myth. From it all she emerges as something entirely other—part human, part beast, part French, part Native Canadian. She gets lost between worlds and cannot quite emerge whole in either one.

Elle is a complex and compelling tale. Glover deftly weaves past and present to create a truly modern account of a historical event.