Vandal Love
An astonishing novel of epic ambition, Vandal Love—winner of the prestigious Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first book in 2007—follows generations of a unique French-Canadian family across North America and through the twentieth century.
A family curse, a genetic trick resulting from centuries of hardship, causes the Hervé children to be born either giants or runts. Book One follows the giants’ line, exploring Jude Hervé’s career as a boxer in Georgia and Louisiana in the 1960s; his escape from that brutal life with his baby daughter, Isa; and her eventual decision to enter into a strange, chaste marriage with a much older man. Book Two traces a different kind of life entirely, as the runts of the family discover that their power lies in a kind of unifying love. François seeks the identity of his missing father for years, while his own son flees from modern society into spiritual quests.
In assured and mystically powerful prose, Deni Ellis Béchard tells a wide-ranging, spellbinding story of a family trying to create and identity in an unwelcoming landscape. Vandal Love is a breathtaking literary debut about the power of love to create and destroy.
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Deni Ellis Béchard
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