Overview

An astonishing novel of epic ambition, Vandal Love—winner of the prestigious Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first book in 2007—follows generations of a unique French-Canadian family across North America and through the twentieth century. A family curse—a genetic trick resulting from centuries of hardship—causes the Hervé children to be born either giants or runts. Book One follows the giants’ line, exploring Jude Hervé’s career as a boxer in Georgia and Louisiana in the 1960s, his escape from that brutal life alone with his baby daughter Isa, and her eventual decision to enter into a strange, chaste marriage with a much older man. Book Two traces a different kind of life entirely, as the runts of the family discover that their power lies in a kind of unifying love. François seeks the identity of his missing father for years, while his own son, Harvey, flees from modern society into spiritual quests. But none of the Hervés can abandon their longing for a place where they might find others like themselves. In assured and mystically powerful prose, Deni Y. Béchard tells a wide-ranging, spellbinding story of a family trying to create an identity in an unwelcoming landscape. Imbued throughout with a deep sensitivity to the physical world, Vandal Love is a breathtaking literary debut about the power of love to create and destroy—in our lives, and in our history.

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9781571310910

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Praise for Vandal Love <br> Don't think of Vandal Love as a page-turner. It's a novel you'll want o read slowly, savoring prose that's both lyrical and gritty, able to evoke big emotions with exquisite intimacy. Deni Y. Bechard's masterful debut sweeps through North America from rural early-20th-century Quebec to an ashram in 21st-century-New Mexico, following several generations of a French-Canadian family in which 'children were born alternately brutes or runts.' Family patriarch Herve Herve, a farmer and fisherman who speaks of his larger children as 'keepers' (some of the small ones he actually gives away), 'had become as hard as the country...so that it was he his children now fled.' As Herve's progeny scatter south and west from Quebec, each is driven by a visceral longing to connect, whether to God or mere humans. But whatever happiness they manage to find never lasts long. Inevitably Herve's descendants leave, or are left by, anyone who could soothe their loneliness. And the path to God is, as one character comes to realize, 'the least sure of all roads.' If this unusual story--like its characters--occasionally seems to wander without a clear destination, the final stunningly poignant pages prove that Bechard knew exactly where he was taking us all along. <br>-- O, The Oprah Magazine <br> In this moving and entertaining debut, the Herve family suffers from a genetic quirk--or divine malady--that results in their children growing into towering brutes or sickly runts. In mid-20th-century Quebec, the hard drinking patriarch Herve Herve reduces his family by lending--or simply giving away--the runts, while keeping the giants for labor. Set both in Canada and several American states, from Maine to New Mexico, and spanning more than half a century, the novel divides itself between the isolated introspective pugilist giant Jude, and Francois, a sociable, religious runt. Though the two Herve brothers are very different in appearance, they both feel the n

Praise for Vandal Love <br> In this moving and entertaining debut, the Herve family suffers from a genetic quirk--or divine malady--that results in their children growing into towering brutes or sickly runts. In mid-20th-century Quebec, the hard drinking patriarch Herve Herve reduces his family by lending--or simply giving away--the runts, while keeping the giants for labor. Set both in Canada and several American states, from Maine to New Mexico, and spanning more than half a century, the novel divides itself between the isolated introspective pugilist giant Jude, and Francois, a sociable, religious runt. Though the two Herve brothers are very different in appearance, they both feel the need to strike out alone, creating their own families and identities in transcontinental voyages. This is both a road novel and a voyage through time, with each of the book's two parts covering the lifetimes of several family members in an examination of the Herve lineage. Ruminations abound on sex, violence, and the bonds between people. Though Bechard (Cures for Hunger, a memoir) has a journalism background, this fiction debut, unfolding in punchy prose, recalls Marquez with a French-Canadian twist. <br>-- Publishers Weekly (starred) <br> An enormously impressive debut by a clearly gifted writer. <br>--Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent From A Strange Mountain <br> Vandal Love introduces a gifted new writer. Bechard's surety of voice and confident narrative span declare a first rate novel and an eloquent debut. <br>--Commonwealth Judging Panel <br> Reminiscent of Proulx and Doctorow in both sweep and grace of prose, it is hard to believe that Vandal Love, so elegant and accomplished, is only Bechard's first novel. <br>--Dagoberto Gilb, Author of The Magic of Blood and Woodcuts of Women <br> The word 'masterpiece' is not to be used lightly, but one is tempted in the case of Vandal Love, for the scope of its ambition, it

Author Information

"Deni Y. Bechard's first novel, ""Vandal Love,"" (Doubleday Canada, 2006) won the 2007 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the best first book in the entire British Commonwealth. He has been a fellow at MacDowell, Jentel, the Edward Albee Foundation, Ledig House, the Anderson Center, and the Vermont Studio Center, among others. His articles, stories and translations have appeared in a number of magazines and newspapers, among them the ""National Post,"" the ""Harvard Review"" and the ""Harvard Divinity Bulletin."" He has done freelance reporting from Iraq, Afghanistan, and has lived in and traveled through over thirty countries. When not traveling, he divides his time between Japan, Cambridge, and Montreal. ""Cures for Hunger"" and ""Vandal Love"" are his first--and simultaneous--book-length publications in the United States."

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