The party wall - Catherine Leroux

Shortlisted for the 2016 Giller Prize

Selected for Indies Introduce Summer/Fall 2016

Catherine Leroux's first novel, translated into English brilliantly by Lazer Lederhendler, ties together stories about siblings joined in surprising ways. A woman learns that she absorbed her twin sister's body in the womb and that she has two sets of DNA; a girl in the deep South pushes her sister out of the way of a speeding train, losing her legs; and a political couple learn that they are non-identical twins separated at birth. The Party Wall establishes Leroux as one of North America's most intelligent and innovative young authors.

Catherine Leroux was born in 1979 in Montreal, Quebec, where she continues to live and write.

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Praise for The Party Wall

"A revelation… an emotionally affecting, intellectually stimulating examination of separation and connection."-Ian McGillis, Montreal Gazette

"…an intoxicating blend of the familiar and the uncanny, brilliantly executed...The Party Wall has the narrative force of a Hollywood film, while also offering richly executed portraits of the characters' interior lives."-Montreal Review of Books

"Catherine Leroux writes with a startling grace. Her vision is clear-eyed and true, her heart is as big as sky and bay. The Party Wall's mothers, orphans, Olympians and prime ministers seem like living, breathing people. And they reveal, beat by beat, that the things that divide us also knit us together."-Sean Michaels, author of Us Conductors

"Initially, The Party Wall reads like a collection of linked stories; past the halfway mark, however, it reveals itself as something more intricate and cumulative… A surprising, carefully structured novel that for English readers will bring to mind David Mitchell, this feels much more expansive than its page count."-The Globe and Mail

"…full of insightful passages, dynamic characters and surprising situations. The Party Wall is a searching investigation of familial ties of biology and biography and the complex ways in which self-discovery affects our relationships."-The Winnipeg Review

"[T]his book's sensibility is as unique as the situations Catherine Leroux creates for her characters ... The pacing is so subtle, the leaps and links among the storylines so imaginative, it's unlike anything I've read in a long time."-Martha Sharpe, Flying Books

"Catherine Leroux presents four narratives whose characters, at first glance, are far removed from each other physically, socially, and spiritually. Each is involved in a quest for a parent or a resolution with a family member that will reaffirm and define his or her own identity. When Leroux does establish connections among her characters, she deftly demonstrates the way in which humanity is interdependent and connected, no matter the walls erected to keep people out or in. Leroux's characters, in such familiar situations, are well-defined and more than worthy of our sympathy."-Mary Fran Buckley, Eight Cousins (Falmouth, MA)