After experiencing the disintegration of their parents’ marriage, Claudine and Janine Beaulieu’s lives are further complicated when their mother Odette remarries an Anglophone and they are forced to “turn English.”

Now, years later, Claudine has made a career out of documentary filmmaking, focusing on the painful lives of other women; Janine, a wife and mother, questions her feelings for her sister’s boyfriend; and Odette succumbs to her Valium and rum addiction in a luxury retirement villa in Jamaica. Shifting from Duplessis’s Montreal of the fifties to Toronto in the eighties, Voice-Over chronicles the lives of a mother and daughters struggling to find their voice in a bilingual country.

Carole Corbeil was born and raised in Montreal, where she attended French and English schools before taking degrees at Atlantic College in Wales and York University in Toronto. She was an art critic and covered theatre, books, dance, and visual arts for The Globe and Mail in the eighties. Voice-Over was shortlisted for the Books in Canada First Novel Award in 1992, and was co-winner of the Toronto Book Award in 1993. Corbeil died of cancer in 2000.

Carole Corbeil's profile page

• Joint winner, Toronto Book Award
• Short-listed, <i>Books in Canada</i> First Novel Award

“Voice-Over is a wonderful novel and Carole Corbeil is a powerful novelist. Her fiction stands out and should never be forgotten. It is thrilling to see this work reissued.”

Michael Ondaatje