GOOD BOY

"We laugh over and above the tears. She unties her bathrobe. I slip her nightgown off; it sends shivers down my spine to see the wound, held together by dozens of staples. Two pieces of skin; the bottom of her body and the top, joined by cold, metal staples. I don't know how I'm going to clean it; I have to avoid getting water in the wound. My mother's breasts. My mother's hips. My mother's private parts. Her kidney, abandoned somewhere, her dead kidney, thrombosed, inflamed. I clean my mother with a washcloth. Me, her superficial son who wouldn't want to stain the tiniest spot of his white T-shirt with blood."

The new novel by the author of Coco, winner of the 2016 Robert-Cliche Award.

In Good Boy, Antoine Charbonneau-Demers replicates the same offbeat, candid voice that turned so many heads with his debut novel, Coco. This time, he tells the story of a young man new to Montreal who falls in love with the big city he is discovering at his own risk and peril. This young author keeps readers on the edge of their seats with a literary project that's psychological without being psychologized, and aesthetic without being aestheticized.