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Lucien & Olivia (Print)

$18.95

A comic statement on the beautiful waywardness of life. Built on scenes of discovery and error, the novel satirizes the transactional view of human relations that has elbowed its way into our lives by way of contemporary political discourse.

SKU: 978-0-88753-626-7-1 Categories: , ,

Black Moss Editorial Team

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“The explorations of intimacy are human and frank. The search for love, meaning and trust and yes, even romance, is all the more compelling set against the backdrop of engine rooms and the modest rooming houses and temporary first homes of the young characters.”

Natalie Meisner, author of Speed Dating for Sperm Donors

“André Narbonne has created a true emotional roller-coaster of a story. It’s like Jack Kerouac, Russell Banks and Raymond Carver came together to write a quintessentially Canadian love story —dark, angst-ridden and haunting, but so eloquent that Lucien and Olivia stay with me as my troubled but hopeful friends long after I finished the novel.”

Lesley Choyce, author of Saltwater Chronicles

“Narbonne demonstrates a short story writer’s gift for creating a system of experiences that propel us deep into his characters’ obsessions, fears and desires. His two protagonists are at times their own worst enemies, consistently saying and doing the wrong thing at the worst possible time, as if they are working at cross-purposes, even as they aim for such noble goals as love and self-improvement. The result is an intense mosaic, an almost synesthetic involvement with these idiosyncratic people as they try against their own misdirections to live ordinary lives together. In other words, it is the most realistic—and beautiful—of love stories.”

Chris Benjamin, author of Boy With AProblem

Description

Lucien and Olivia by André Narbonne, author of Twelve Miles to Midnight, is a comic statement on the beautiful waywardness of life. Built on scenes of discovery and error, the novel satirizes the transactional view of human relations that has elbowed its way into our lives by way of contemporary political discourse.

The novel is set in the 1980s before cell phones, personal computers, and Facebook “likes.” Lucien is a marine engineer on a Canadian tanker. While on one-month leave in Halifax, he meets Olivia, a brilliant philosophy student at Dalhousie University, who takes an immediate dislike to him. What begins as mutual antipathy changes when they discover how compatible their oddities are. Charged by Olivia not to say he loves her, Lucien returns to sea and to a job characterized by its plodding predictability. Here he discovers that not everything in his life is foreseeable, including his feelings for Olivia. This is a fascinating and different work of fiction.