, we caught up with the author to chat about everything from his writing process to his literary influences., and now we’re getting the chance to dig a little deeper into this Canadian author’s inspirations and writing habits.—which will be released on 18 April—centres around Alex, a motherless stockboy in 1830s Montreal, waiting desperately for his father to return from France.
I accepted that I’d have to go back and make a lot of cuts and additions, which isn’t uncommon for me, and while it can sometimes be tedious, in this case it was actually pretty helpful because I had to write in a tone and aesthetic that I wasn’t especially familiar with.
For this book, the situation came first—the medical experiments, the injury, and the role injury plays in power dynamics, which is a fascinating angle—and I developed the characters and the rest of the storyline after I started writing, generally scribbling stuff in notebooks or texting myself ideas to push it along.