Maïna

Marguerite Andersen is a professor of French Studies at the University
of Guelph. She is the author of Courts métrages et instantanés and La
Soupe.

Dominique Demers is well known as an award-winning writer of young-adult
fiction; Maпna is her first work of adult fiction. In a short preface,
she writes that she became interested in investigating Indian and Inuit
societies after visiting a museum and looking at the face of a woman who
may have lived several thousand years ago.

The novel describes an Amerindian tribe that lived some 3500 years ago.
Its central figure, Maпna, is a woman possessed by the will to go
hunting with the men. Thanks to her father, she succeeds. Obliged to
fight the man she is supposed to marry, Maпna departs on an epic
journey that takes her from her tribe, the NearlyWolves, to the land of
the Inuits where she will live with the Ice People. A stranger in their
land, she must prove her worth before she can be accepted and establish
a family with one of the great hunters of the Polar Regions.

Fundamentally, the book is about the hardships, doubt, and homesickness
a displaced person must endure. Demers spent two years researching
documents on archeology, anthropology, prehistory, mores and beliefs in
order to gain the knowledge she needed to write Maпna’s story. She
also studied the fauna and flora of the Lower North Coast and the Far
North. The novel attests to her fascination with and her deep
understanding of the first humans who lived on our land.

Finely translated by Leonard Sugden, Maпna is an exciting novel that
will inform and entertain adults and young adults alike.