Governor General's Award Finalist

The Globe 100: The very best of 2011

Somewhere in Montreal, in the not too distant future, an obscure company offers custom-designed suicides for its clients with one condition: their desire to die must be pure and absolute. Antoinette Beauchamp is a successful candidate but her suicide is not. Now a bedridden paraplegic, hooked up to machines that monitor all her bodily functions, she tells her story, taking the reader into the Kafkaesque world of the company and its bewildering cast of characters.

Exit is at once a profound examination of what it is that drives someone to want to end their life, as well as how that urge can be turned on its head against all odds. Written with her signature brio and acerbic wit, Nelly Arcan's last novel is a hymn to life.

Praise for Exit:

Top 10 Book of 2011, Shelf Unbound

Book Club Pick, Shelf Unbound

Recommended Read, 49th Shelf

"A work of originality pushed to the limit. It's crazy. Full of imagination. Even funny at times. A story unlike any other." (Le Devoir)

"a compelling crawl through the claustro confines of depression and sweeping suicidal desire ... Dark, beautiful, poignant and clever, Arcan's Exit is a powerful read." (The Globe & Mail)

Praise for Nelly Arcan:

"... Fantastically intelligent, always trying to second-guess how a woman should be, Arcan finds death the only answer to her predicament. In style and emotion - and honesty - her work is a much closer cousin to Edouard Leve's Suicide than to the archness of Belle de Jour or Catherine Millet. The best way to absorb Arcan's work is to read it in chronological order, and then to lament that the titles of her work - Whore, Hysteric, Breakneck, Exi - so succinctly and poignantly summarize the short life and hard-won philosophy of this exceptional writer." (The Times Literary Supplement)

Nelly Arcan was born in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. Her first novel Putain (2001; Whore, 2004, Grove Press), drawing on her experience working in the sex trade in Montreal, caused a sensation and enjoyed immediate critical and media success. It was a finalist for both the Prix Médicis and the Prix Femina, two of France’s most prestigious literary awards. Two more novels followed, establishing her as a literary star in Quebec and France: Folle (2004), also nominated for the Prix Femina; and À ciel ouvert (2007). She is also the author of an illustrated book on the beauty myth for young girls: L’enfant dans le miroir (2007).

Paradis, clef en main (Exit) was her fourth novel and was completed just days before she committed suicide in 2009 at the age of thirty-six.

Nelly Arcan's profile page

David Scott Hamilton was born in Adelaide, South Australia. He was educated in schools throughout Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, before settling in Vancouver, B.C. He studied linguistics and French at Simon Fraser University, and French literature and law at the University of Ottawa. He has worked as a freelance translator since 1995, most notably for the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Quebec. Exit, his translation of Nelly Arcan’s final novel, Paradis, clef en main, was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation and named a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book. He lives in Montreal.

David Scott Hamilton's profile page