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Julia Hoop, a twenty-five-year-old counselling psych student, is working on her thesis, exploring an idea which makes her graduate supervisor squirm. She is conducting interview after interview with a group of women she affectionately calls the Molestas – women whose experience of childhood sexual abuse did not cause physical trauma. Julia is the expert, she claims, because she has the experience; her own father, Dirtbag, a furniture designer and failed poet, disappeared when she was eight leaving behind nothing but his Dylan Thomas book, and a legacy of addiction and violence. But the more Julia learns, the less certain she is of what she believes.

When both her boyfriend and her graduate advisor break up with her on the same day, Julia leaves her city of Vancouver on a bicycle for a cross-Canada trip in search of her father, or so she tells people. Julia will visit the three cities from which he’s contacted her over the years: Banff, Alberta; Redvers, Saskatchewan; and Kingston, Ontario. Her unexpected travel partner is Smirks, a handsome athlete who also has a complicated history, and with whom Julia is falling in love. Their travel days are marked by peaks of ecstatic physical exertion, and their nights by frustrated drinking and drugs. After an unsettling incident in rural Saskatchewan involving a trio of aggressive children, Julia wakes up in the morning to discover Smirks has disappeared. Everything, once again, falls apart.

Sometimes shocking in its candour, yet charmed with enigmatic characters, Pedal is an exploration of the potholes and pitfalls of identity. It is a close look at how we are shaped by accidents of timing: trauma and sex, brain chemistry and the landscape of our country. Pedal challenges beliefs we hold dear about the nature of pedophilia, the essence of innocence and the idea that the past is something one runs from.

In 1979, the legendary Acadian novelist Antonine Maillet won France’s most coveted literary award, the Prix Goncourt, for the original version of this novel, P&#233lagie-la-Charette. In her acceptance speech, she said, “I have avenged my ancestors.”

Goose Lane Editions is proud to re-issue this classic of Acadian literature to mark the 400th anniversary of the founding of Acadie and the d&#233but of the novel’s musical adaptation, P&#233lagie: An Acadian Odyssey. Directed by Michael Shamata, the musical brings together the words and lyrics of Vincent de Tourdonnet and music by Allen Cole. It will be presented at the Atlantic Theatre Festival in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, from July 27 to August 22, following successful runs at CanStage’s Bluma Appel Theatre in Toronto and The National Arts Centre in Ottawa.

This funny, lyrical account of a daring Acadian widow’s journey home from exile is the Mother Courage of Acadian literature. At thirty-five, P&#233lagie is a survivor of the Great Disruption of 1755, when British soldiers deported Acadians who had farmed along the Bay of Fundy for generations. Splitting up families, the soldiers tossed men, women, and children pell-mell into ships and dispatched them to ports all along the eastern seaboard of the US and to Louisiana. When it was heard years later that the British would tolerate their return to Acadie, thousands loaded possessions and children onto handcarts and set out on foot. After fifteen years of working as a slave in the cotton fields of Georgia, P&#233lagie, too, has had enough. Drawn home as if by a magnet, inspired by her love of her family and of Beausoleil, a heroic sea captain, and determined to outrace the “Wagon of Death,” P&#233lagie sets off to take her people on a 3,000-mile trek back to their homeland. Her single cart, pulled by six oxen, soon attracts scattered Cormiers and LeBlancs, Landrys and Poiriers, Maillets and L&#233gers. Together, this caravan of colourful Acadians undertakes a ten-year journey up the Atlantic coast to their childhood homes.