On New Year’s eve, 1847, eleven-year-old Baptiste finds himself far from his friends and family and his home in La Beauce. He has come to the woods of the Ottawa Valley to live and work among “the finest lumberjacks in Canada.” As the New Year approaches, Baptiste and the lumberjacks grow more and more homesick. Resolved to see their families again before the stroke of midnight, the crew board a magical canoe that lifts them into the air, across villages, and closer to home.

This beautiful retelling of the Quebecois folktale reunites Roch Carrier with illustrator Sheldon Cohen and translator Sheila Fischman. (The Hockey Sweater, The Basketball Player, The Longest Home Run), and brings this beloved story to life.

ROCH CARRIER, who studied at the Universite de Montreal and completed a doctorate in Paris at the Sorbonne, is a novelist, playwright and children's author, and past winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. Formerly the director of the Canada Council for the Arts and the National Librarian of Canada, Carrier is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and an Officer of the Order of Canada, and he holds many honorary doctorates. A quote from Carrier’s Canadian children's classic The Hockey Sweater could be found until recently on the back of Canada’s five-dollar bill. Carrier lives in Montreal.

DONALD WINKLER was born in Winnipeg in 1940, graduated from the University of Manitoba in 1961, and did graduate study as a Woodrow Wilson Scholar at the Yale School of Drama. From 1967 to 1995 he was a film director and writer at the National Film Board of Canada in Montreal, and, since the 1980s, has been a translator of Quebec literature: in 1994, 2011 and 2013 he won the Governor General’s Award for French to English translation, and has been a finalist for the prize on two other occasions.

Roch Carrier's profile page

Sheldon Cohen's profile page

Sheila Fischman's profile page