Asbestos

In the summer of 1986, in the shadow of the monumental open-pit mines of Thetford Mines, Quebec, nine-year-old Steve Dubois lives a life measured by bicycle rides, comic books, and daring adventures across blinding white heaps of asbestos slag alongside his older friend, Charlélie Poulin—known as Poulie. Beneath the dusty haze of an industry town that trades in danger, Steve and Poulie invent secret hideouts and escape the suffocating realities of their homes. But 1986 is marked by cataclysms near and far—from the televised explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger to a devastating local tragedy that shatters Steve’s fragile world forever. Five years later, in 1991, Steve returns to the cratered landscape as an adolescent haunted by guilt, searching through the toxic dust for the vanished innocence of a paradise he can never reclaim. Sébastien Dulude’s debut novel, brilliantly translated by Pablo Strauss, is an extraordinary, sensory tour de force—a poignant meditation on toxic heritage, boyhood brotherhood, and the immutable grief of growing up.