Last Bullet Is for You, The

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept is the title of Canadian writer Elizabeth Smart's classic hymn to love, which novelist Angela Carter once described as being "like Madame Bovary blasted by lightning." Later, Carter wrote privately to a friend, saying that she would hate any daughter of hers to have to write such a novel, adding, "By Grand Central Station I Tore Off his Balls would be more like it, I should hope." And now along comes Montreal novelist Martine Delvaux with The Last Bullet Is for You. This stream-of-consciousness novel takes the form a love letter, but it is the last one. One last letter filled as much with the memory of love as the desire for revenge. Love is war, wrote Ovid, and this book is a battleground. Writing is both an act of passion and the means to end it once and for all. Writing is the last bullet, shooting through the love story and into what is left of the lover: a ghost, a fiction. And maybe that's what he was from the start.

Novelist Martine Delvaux was born in Québec City and brought up in a francophone village in Ontario. Her most recent books are an essay on photographer Nan Goldin and another on serial irls from Barbie to Pussy Riot, which will be published in English by Between the Lines. Delvaux studied in the United States and England and now lives in Montreal, where she teaches women's studies at Université du Québec à Montréal.

"Fans of the gritty realism in works by Quebec authors such as Heather O'Neill or Rawi Hage will find another favourite in Delvaux." -Dora Cerny

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