To write Jocasta Regina, Nancy Huston slipped into the two fables of Oedipus and gave a voice to Oedipus Rex’s wife, Jocasta, who has been silent for more than two thousand years. She shows us a Jocasta amidst her own people. Jocasta the wife, the mother of four children, the queen, she who cares for a city struck by plague. She is passionately in love with her husband Oedipus. Jocasta’s voice is heard through the women of the play: her daughters and her servant woman. She confides to them the family secrets carried by all women. Through the warmth and intimacy of a modern Jocasta, Nancy Huston summons the themes most dear to her - eroticism, motherhood, love, creation, and makes a tender tribute to this woman, a symbol of the fullness and invincible nature of maternal love. A piece composed as a huge poem, in which tragedy and comedy alternate, Jocasta Regina invites us to observe our own compulsions, and to identify what makes us so compulsive ...

Nancy Huston’s books have won the Prix Goncourt des Lyceéns, the Prix Elle (Quebec) and the Governor General’s Award. Her novel, The Mark of the Angel, was an international bestseller, which won the Grand Prix des Lectrices de Elle, the Canadian Jewish Fiction Book Award, the Torgi Award and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. Fault Lines won the Prix Femina in 2006. Nancy Huston lives in Paris with her husband, the writer Tzvetan Todorov, and their two children.

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