This novel takes place in rural Quebec from a century ago, reminiscent of a local tale imbued with magical realism. The story exudes both sensuality and harshness, a ballet that takes us from the bed of Peau-de-Sang, the village feather plucker, to the forest trips to prune maple trees, from feather plucking to damaged hearts and hands. Although this story takes place in the past, it contains topics that are still very relevant today: learning about sexuality, the expression of desire, but also the condition of women, especially those who transgress established morals. The one from whom we take, but on whom we wish to cast shame and contempt. This novel celebrates femininity and freedom, the transmission of knowledge, it illuminates things that change, but above all, those that remain the same. It will make you grateful for your 21st-century life, but it will also make you want to put on a skirt and a corset, and get to work while listening to the geese chirping. - Émilie Carpentier, bookseller at La maison des feuilles
"It's a levitating novel set in a timeless city, in the forests of the unreal. A text that perfects the mythology its author has been building, book after book." - Quentin Lafay - Les Matins du samedi, France Culture
"Grim, bloody, carnal, powerful, amoral, fantastic, sulphurous, drawing its strength from the absolute emancipation of the female voice. This sixth novel is all that, and much more. Those who have fallen under the spell of Audrée Wilhelmy's writing will once again be pulsating with her and her narrator, the village writer whose nickname is Peau-de-sang." - Iris Gagnon-Paradis, La Presse
"At the height of her powers, Audrée Wilhelmy brilliantly appropriates a wide range of images, characters and stories from the collective imagination and delivers an original tale that is perfectly in line with her previous novels, while forging a strong link between ancestral Quebec and the Quebec of today." - Manon Dumais, Le Devoir
Selection for the 2025 Five Continents and Francophonie Prize
Booksellers’ Selection for the 2024 Literary Season
Selection of Leclerc Cultural Spaces for the 2024 literary season
A novel imbued with a rare, incantatory force, at the crossroads of the freedom of Goliarda Sapienza and the poetry of Bérengère Cournut.
The village feather shop is the place where desires of all ages and fortunes converge. There, swirling among white geese and blood, lives the featherworker, a wild she-devil, free in body and soul. Her brazen skin ignites beastly urges, thwarting the spells that plague the hunting and mating seasons in the realm of Kangoq. Healing the living with her magic hands, she absorbs the prohibitions they dare not transgress. While the mayor, the doctor, the notary, the tinsmith, the letter carrier and above all Sulfureur pay her in cash or furs for their pleasure, women discover the way to be in tune with their sex.
Peau-de-Sang is a portrait of an extraordinary woman who is at once a mother, a witch, and a prostitute. In it, rituals are observed, traditions passed on, and pleasure is always exhilarating. Audrée Wilhelmy’s new novel celebrates generations of charmeresses disguised in the fine lace of irrepressible, age-old urges.
Peau-de-Sang is an ode to the irrepressible vehemence of femininity.
