Pour solder la fin des cours, au début de l’été 1988, dans une vallée reculée du Québec, des adolescents se sont donné rendez-vous à la lisière d’un champ de maïs. Un feu de joie, du rock à plein volume et plusieurs motos garées près de la ferme voisine. Avec intensité, Hélène Frédérick profite de cette nuit blanche pour faire un portrait libre de cette jeunesse à travers les regards alternés de Fred – l’exclu écorché vif –, de Mathieu – le playboy contrarié –, et de Julie – la mélancolique jouisseuse.

Leurs corps tournoient entre deux âges, se perdent dans la pénombre, se jalousent de loin, s’attisent de plus près, mais on pressent qu’un drame va se produire. De cette rage de vivre restera l’éclat persistant de quelques « étoiles filantes » à qui ce roman est dédié.




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La nuit sauve takes us into the heart of rural Québec, with a band of high-school students celebrating the end of the school-year and the beginning of the summer of 1988.The novel begins with the mono-logue of Fred, a teenager who is mature but out of sorts with himself. That evening, while his classmates raise joyful hell on the edge of a field, he feeds the fire that will keep them up until the small hours of the morning. Then Mathieu explains his point of view. He initiated the party. An attractive boy, he already has a job at the local cannery and a shiny motorcycle that he likes to drive through the rows of corn. And finally, it is Julie’s turn to express her thoughts, in complicity with her inseparable friend Sophie. They have a lot to say about some of the other revellers — about Anélie, a well-bred girl whose arrogant beauty turns a lot of heads, or about Caroline, whose obscene provocations evoke the most troubling desires.
In this story based on a real-life event, written in an expressive and tense style, Hélène Frédérick recreates the mood of this Québécois youth at the end of the 80s. At the end of that wild initiation night, where social and sexual tensions act upon each other as elements of arousal, persists the brilliance of these ephemeral «shooting stars» to whom this novel is dedicated.




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« Like love, travel, nights and parties, some books capture time while it is burning. ’’

En Attendant Nadeau

‘‘ The expansed time of this novel makes it a wonderful resurrection of the lost eras, with their power of enchantment and their promises of death.’’

Diacritik