Additional information
by Dominique Fortier (Author), Rhonda Mullins (Translator)
From the author of Pale Shadows, a delicate reimagining of the relationships that created the great American novel
While writing Moby Dick, Herman Melville meets Nathaniel Hawthorne, an encounter that alters the course of his life and his novel. From this true story of friendship, only a handful of Melville's letters remain. Inspired by the surviving correspondence, Dominique Fortier imagines the passionate relationship between the two authors: their desires, their domestic arrangements, Melville's struggle to write, and Hawthorne's powerful hold over Melville.
Melville's story is interspersed with the frantic scribbling of Lizzie, his wife, her words flying onto the page, her stream of consciousness ideas and talents not given the same time and space to develop as her husband's.
A third exchange unfolds between Fortier as she is writing the book and a companion who is half real, half imagined, a man she says is primarily a poem. Forming a bridge between past and present, Fortier's novel braids together these three parts, telling the story of the most beautiful of shipwrecks, Moby Dick.
Author Biography
Writer and translator, Dominique Fortier weaves together novel, poetry, and essay to build a body of work exploring history, fiction, and the self. Her first novel, Du bon usage des étoiles (On the Proper Use of Stars), was nominated for a Governor General's Award and the Prix des Libraires du Québec, and Au péril de la mer (The Island of Books) won the Governor General's Award for French fiction. Les villes de papier (Paper Houses) won France's Prix Renaudot - Essai and has been translated into fifteen languages. Fortier is a member of the Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco literary council.
Rhonda Mullins is a Montréal-based translator who has translated many books from French into English, including Jocelyne Saucier's And Miles To Go Before I Sleep, Grégoire Courtois's The Laws of the Skies, Dominique Fortier's Pale Shadows, and Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette's Suzanne. She is a seven-time finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for Translation, winning the award in 2015 for her translation of Jocelyne Saucier's Twenty-One Cardinals. Her translation of Dominique Fortier's Pale Shadows was nominated for the 2025 International Dublin Literary Award. Her translations have been contenders for CBC Canada Reads in 2015 and 2019, and one was a finalist for the 2018 Best Translated Book Award. Mullins was the inaugural literary translator in residence at Concordia University in 2018. She is a mentor to emerging translators in the Banff International Literary Translation Program.
