“A fresh little novel, teeming with life, of uncommon strength.” – Gilles Marcotte, L’actualité
An audacious and playful debut novel of adventure, brotherhood, and the search for a homeland — a contemporary classic of Quebecois literature

Written with uncommon wit, The Harmattan Winds is a feast of wordplay, rife with puns and wonder – perfect for devotees of Ali Smith, classic adventure novels like The Adventures of Huckleberry, and John Knowles’s A Separate Peace.

Hidden in the reeds floating on a pond next to the highway, a woman finds a baby bobbing in a shopping basket. Adopted by the Francoeurs, Hugues remains an outsider in his semi-family. At the same time, Habéké is adopted by a Canadian family and brought to Quebec after his own family dies of famine in Ethiopia. On the margins of their small town, the boys become sworn brothers, searching for their roots, desperate to return to exile, to a paradise called Ityopia.

Narrated by the bold and imaginative voice of Hugues, Sylvain Trudel’s prize-winning debut novel is at times serious and at times fantastical. In their child’s world, where Hugues and Habéké haven’t yet learned the prejudices of adults, they embark on adventures, digging holes to China and building fantastical contraptions to take them to far off places, like their hero, explorer Roald Amundsen.

SYLVAIN TRUDEL is a novelist and author of several books for children. He is a nature-lover and a traveller, and his adventures have taken him to many parts of the world. His novels have won several literary prizes including the Canada-Switzerland prize.

Sylvain Trudel's profile page

Donald Winkler was born in Winnipeg, graduated from the University of Manitoba, and did graduate study 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, a translator of Quebec literature. In 1994, 2011, and 2013 he won the Governor General Award for French to English translation, and has been a finalist for the prize on three other occasions. His translation of Samuel Archibald's short story collection, "Arvida," was a finalist for the 2015 Giller Prize. He lives in Montreal, Quebec.

Donald Winkler's profile page

"This tale is told in what may at first seem like a foreign language, probably because it is—one as foreign as anything utterly original, unconstrained by rules or logic. Nonetheless, if you allow it to pour over you, or into you, it soon becomes as lucid as if it were actually your native tongue, the one you understood (and may have been doomed to forget) before you were even born." —Doon Arbus

"Sylvain Trudel has peerless insight into a child's speech, imagination, and supple sense of wonder. With The Harmattan Winds, he has blessed us with the gift of childhood." —Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books

"The Harmattan Winds is a beguiling fairy tale of a book, indebted as much to Bellow’s Henderson as it is to the immortal Peter Pan, a slender novel of the great adventure that is growing up." —Rumaan Alam