Twenty-One Cardinals — Jocelyne Saucier

From the author and translator of And the Birds Rained Down, a 2015 CBC Canada Reads selection

An abandoned mine. A large family driven by honour. And a source of pain, buried deep in the ground.

We're nothing like other families. We are self-made. We are an essence unto ourselves, unique and dissonant, the only members of our species. Livers of humdrum lives who flitted around us got their wings burned. We're not mean, but we can bare our teeth. People didn't hang around when a band of Cardinals made its presence known.

With twenty-one kids, the Cardinal family is a force of nature. And now, after not being in the same room for decades, they're congregating to celebrate their father, a prospector who discovered the zinc mine their now-deserted hometown in northern Quebec was built around. But as the siblings tell the tales of their feral childhood, we discover that Angèle, the only Cardinal with a penchant for happiness, has gone missing â€" although everyone has pretended not to notice for years. Why the silence? What secrets does the mine hold?

Praise for the French edition of Twenty­-One Cardinals:

‘With its explosive, poignant, funny and tragic story and memorable characters, Les héritiers de la mine is an important novel … Through the destiny of this large family, the author talks about Abitibi, where she lives, and of its broken dreams and cheated workers, the blind power of multinationals,the disappearance of villages and families decimated. Her protagonists have the makings of heroes, the stuff to withstand adversity; they may be local heroes, but their fight is universal.' -- Voir (translated from the French)