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The Sino-Indian war has ended. The Chinese community in Calcutta (Kolkata), feeling threatened and facing discrimination, begins to look for ways to emigrate. By the seventies they are flocking to Canada legally or otherwise. Wen-Lung, a young man in his twenties, goes away on a tourist visa to Toronto where he marries Megan, a white Canadian woman, in order to obtain his legal papers. He leaves behind his pregnant wife, Maylei and a two-year old son. When Maylei arrives in Toronto a few years later, the union is far from ideal because Wen-Lung is still attached to Megan. To complicate matters further, Maylei meets her former lover Keith, an Anglo-Indian. When Maylei returns to India to see her aging parents, she finds herself caught in the midst of a race riot.

A touching story of modern exile and immigration, of the pain of leaving and the joy of freedom, set in Tangra, the leather district of Calcutta, and in Toronto’s neighbourhoods.

Édouard, whom we met in The Duchess and the Commoner, a common shoe salesman at the feet of the well-heeled by day; but the “Duchess of Langeais,” star of the transvestite shows on the Main by night, has been left an inheritance by his mother, Victoire. With this money, he sails on the ocean-liner Liberté to Paris, an idealized, glorious foreign place, the art, culture and architecture of which he imagines will be familiar to him from the books and movies he has read and seen. But when he arrives in Paris, his constant encounters with the realities of the primitive and inconvenient aspects of daily life in Europe bring him face to face with the recognition that France is not exclusively the liberating, glorious place he had imagined it to be. The divine Paris, it turns out, does indeed have feet of clay. All of this he records in a diary, which he will send to his sister-in-law, “the fat woman.” Will Édouard survive the disillusionment of both his journey to the imperial centre, and his return to what he previously considered the dull and dreary reality of his life in Montréal?

While all of the six novels in this series recount the moving, hilarious, angry and exotic lives of the generation inhabiting the “Plateau” of Montréal just on the cusp of Québec’s metamorphosis from the oppression of colonialism to a culture with its own identity and language, News from Édouard, volume four in this six-part series of semi-autobiographical novels, is the most pointedly explicit at the level of Tremblay’s sweeping metaphor of Québec’s search for identity, dignity, pride and independence from both its French and its British (Canadian) colonial past.