A small-town embalmer's daughter lifts the shroud on the fascinating minutiae of dealing with the dead.

Imagine rubbing shoulders with the dead for most of your life. As she picks the brain of her father for the most gruesome and thought-provoking secrets of his embalming career - from the drowned boy whose organs were eaten by eels to how to inject just the right amount of colour into a corpse's skin for that blushing look - the narrator must look her parents' deaths, and her relationship with them, straight in the eye.

Quietly poetic, The Embalmer glimpses at something most would rather look away from.

The Embalmer is Anne-Renée Caillé's first novel. She is writing her second book while she works at Queen's University. A regular contributor to Liberté magazine since 2012, she has published fiction and nonfiction in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Anne-Renée divides her time between Kingston and Montreal.

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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.

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