This essay focuses on two novels that deal with major cultural clashes in Quebec: Heather O’Neill’s The Girl Who Was Saturday Night (2014), set on the eve of the 1995 referendum, and Claire Holden Rothman’s My October (2014), which considers the October Crisis of 1970. Rather than shore up the divisions traditionally associated with these events, I argue that both novels encapsulate the anglophone desire for rapprochement within the context of Quebec’s evolving social and political dynamics.
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