rom the author and trans­la­tor of And the Birds Rained Down, a 2015 CBC Cana­da Reads selec­tion Win­ner of the 2015 Gov­er­nor Gen­er­al’s Lit­er­ary Award for French-to-Eng­lish Trans­la­tion 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 – although every­one has pre­tend­ed not to notice for years. Why the silence? What secrets does the mine hold?