Winner of the Governor General's Award for translation Memoirs of a Less Traveled Road: A Historian's Life is the absorbing and candid story of Marcel Trudel's journey from the small village of Saint-Narcisse-de-Champlain, where he was born in 1917, to become one of Canada's major historians. Trudel recreates his youth as the child of a poor family that broke up after the early death of his mother, and the years with his adopted family where, as a lonely child, he learned to love books. His lively descriptions draw the reader into the now-vanished world of life of a boarder in the strictly regimented collèges classiques of his day, and later the vicissitudes of academic life. A brilliant student and tireless researcher, Trudel nevertheless had an intrepid streak that drove him to challenge accepted attitudes, despite reprimands and setbacks. At crucial moments of his life, he took "the road less traveled by," and that made all the difference. This book, dedicated to his granddaughter Catherine, is by turns amusing, touching, and deeply informative about the conflicting attitudes that led to the Quiet Revolution.

Marcel Trudel was an eminent Canadian historian and a respected authority on the history of New France. A fervent advocate of the secular society, he was blacklisted by the Catholic Church from teaching at Laval University in the early 1960s, then taught for several decades at the University of Ottawa. He was an award-winning author of more than 40 books, many of them translated into other languages. Trudel died in 2011.
George Tombs is a Montreal-based author, film-maker, award-winning journalist and translator.

Marcel Trudel's profile page

Jane Brierley is a Montreal literary translator, writer, editor, and former president of the Literary Translators Association of Canada. Her translations of science fiction stories have appeared in a number of Tesseract's anthologies, and she has translated three of Élisabeth Vonarburg's science fiction novels: The Silent City, The Maërlande Chronicles, and Reluctant Voyagers. In 1990 she won the Governor General's Award for best English translation.

Jane Brierley's profile page