Bartleby the Scrivener meets Catch-22 in this charmingly sardonic tale of love, war and fertilizer.

WINNER OF THE PRIX DES COLLAGIENS

Simon turned his thoughts to her daily. There were few enough
of them, but each one lingered. He imagined their life together.
Sometimes even their children’s lives. Sometimes he set his fantasies in Spain, sometimes America, less often Peru– so many settings, all of which turned into the bedroom, eventually.

It's 1862, and Spain is a little rueful about letting Peru have their independence. Or, more importantly, letting Peru have the guano – 'white gold' – on the Chincha Islands. Simon is the ship's recorder on a scientific – okay, military – expedition when he meets, in Callao, the mysterious Montse. She asks of him only that he write her letters. Which he utterly fails to do. As military tensions escalate, so does Simon's unabated lust for Montse – even if he can't bring himself to do anything about it.

"A novel that makes you want to read long passages out loud – or at least memorize snippets, just for the music of the words of Québec writer Louis Carmain." — La Presse (translated from the French)

Louis Carmain holds an MA in Literary Studies from Laval University. He is now a resident of Gatineau, Quebec, where he works as a civil servant. His first novel, Guano, received the prestigious Prix des Collégiens.

Louis Carmain's profile page

Rhonda Mullins is a Montreal-based translator who has translated many books from French into English, including Jocelyne Saucier’s And Miles To Go Before I Sleep, Grégoire Courtois’ The Laws of the Skies, Dominique Fortier’s Paper Houses, 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. Novels she has translated were 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.

Rhonda Mullins' profile page

• Short-listed, Governor General’s Award for Translation
• Winner, Prix des Collégiens

"A novel that makes you want to read long passages out loud – or at least memorize snippets, just for the music of the words of Québec writer Louis Carmain." — La Presse (translated from the French)

‘Guano is funny, strange, smart, beautifully written and hugely entertaining, and certainly one of the best Canadian novels of postmodern historical reimagining since Douglas Glover’s Elle.’

—Pasha Malla, The Globe and Mail