From Donnacona to Thetford Mines, two youth stories and a tall tale from Saint-Baba. Donnacona, 1986, last summer before college. It's the graduation party, the job at the convenience store, the carefree escapades with friends, the drama that one touches without even being aware of it. We leave without knowing what life awaits us or what we are leaving behind. It is the relationship with the father at the end of adolescence, the silences and misunderstandings. It is a story of the father, who tells a vast world like a cosmogony, like a native village. A story of the fifties, of severed fingers, drunk guys, mills and factories, legendary pool games and promises to keep. And then it is the territory that we travel by car in all weathers. The night road will be long from the county of Portneuf to Charlevoix; it will also be long between Quebec and Thetford Mines: the narrator reconnects the threads between mother, father and son. What becomes of our youth in a country we have left? When do we go from one age to another? How do you become an adult? Sometimes you have to find yourself alone in the middle of a snowstorm to understand that you have the future ahead, and that anything can happen.

Quebec is a country of rivers. And, as the geographer, professor and specialist in nordicity, Louis-Edmond Hamelin, said: “I grew up in a row, a river row”. The rivers have shaped the geography, history and socio-economic organization of Quebec and consequently forged the unique identity of Quebecers. This richly illustrated book does not cover all the rivers in Quebec. He presents a few dozen, among the most important - it is very few when we know that there are more than four thousand five hundred of them, three hundred of which have no name - on which Normand Cazelais looks curiously, personal, sometimes intimate. Each river has its history, its character traits, its personality. Together,

November 1917. A gaunt figure moves away from the mountain refuge to slip into the plains of Alberta and Montana. Twenty years after his last appearance in these lands, William Moreland is back, but he's only a shadow of the famous thief of old. Time, this great robber, not only took away his youth and his health, it also took away his only love. Mary Boulton, the one we used to call “the widow”, is no more. Moreland has struggled to move forward ever since, hoping to steal enough money to secure their son's future. Further north in Banff, young Jack languishes like a caged animal in the imposing house of Sister Beatrice, the austere nun who took him in.

Today it looks like I'm living in a painting by Goya. He who painted and noted the whims and upheavals of humanity. Simply. A scene with a disembowelled pig and men crossing the invisible border of stupidity. A scene full of wrongs and beauties. From November 2016 until April 2020, Marc Séguin wrote a column in the Debates section of La Presse +. For more than three years, he looked at the small and large daily affairs from his window as an artist, a hunter, a man of the earth; he shared reflections tinged with his very singular lucidity, at the same time serious, benevolent and smiling. It is said of Marc Séguin that he has the discretion of men of few words. In these pages, however, he told his vegetable garden, maple syrup, his pigs, he talked about agricultural policy, land and immigration, he talked about his children often, Trump sometimes. And always, he spoke right.