Susan Ouriou

Phantom Ships

Susan Ouriou

Novelist and poet Claude Le Bouthillier draws on his Acadian and New Brunswick heritage to create Phantom Ships. First published in 1989 as Le Feu du Mauvais Temps , it gives an account of the end of the French Empire in Canada as experienced by the authors own ancestor, Joseph Le Bouthillier.

Damselfish

Susan Ouriou

Susan Ouriou's first novel explores a season in the life of three women, two sisters – on an artist, the other a codemaker – and their mother. The women have made their separate ways from Montreal to Mexico, the land of their father and husband gone missing ten years ago. Their reunion is a grudging one and their love often aching, uncertain, and flawed. The women's family resembles that of the damselfish, a family of dear enemies where each member jealously guards its own patch of coral reef yet unites with the others to stave off incursions from the outside. A valiant, yet too often futile effort, since, like the damselfish, these women are without defences or camouflage.