Winter is adept at creating the 18th-century world of the historical James Wolfe, but displays less facility in dramatizing the modern Jimmy. Winter’s Jimmy bounces around the city in search of himself, with the help of Sophie, a Mount Royal tent dweller Harold, a fellow vagabond and Genevieve Waugh, a shrewd biographer of Wolfe’s whom Jimmy encounters while reading the major general’s archived letters at the library. Not the war-mongering, history-book soldier, but a nuanced, wounded, grieving, poetry-loving figure suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, a man no one seems to understand. Winter’s premise is that a homeless man named Jimmy Blanchard, wandering the streets of present-day Montreal, may in fact be a reincarnation of that same historic James Wolfe. 13, 1759, British major general James Wolfe achieved final victory over the French army in the battle of the Plains of Abraham, forever changing the course of Canadian history. Like Annabel, the new book contains a richly described landscape that is often boggy and ominous, and a protagonist who is leading a kind of double life. Winter followed that success with a travel memoir and a collection of short fiction, but fans were eager for her to return to the novel form.

Kathleen Winter’s first novel, Annabel, made a deserved splash in 2010: it became a national bestseller and was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and a Governor General’s Literary Award.

Lost in september by kathleen winter