The American Fiancee: A Novel

Written by Eric Dupont

Narrated by Jean Brassard

In this extraordinary breakout novel—a rich, devastatingly humorous epic of one unforgettable family—award-winning author Eric Dupont illuminates the magic of stories, the bonds of family, and the twists of fate and fortune to transform our lives.

Over the course of the twentieth century, three generations of the Lamontagnes will weather love, passion, jealousy, revenge, and death. Their complicated family dynamic—as dramatic as Puccini’s legendary opera, Tosca—will propel their rise, and fall, and take them around the world . . . until they finally confront the secrets of their complicated pasts.

Born on Christmas, Louis Lamontagne, the family’s patriarch, is a larger-than-life lothario and raconteur who inherits his mother’s teal eyes and his father’s brutish good looks and whose charms travel beyond Quebec, across the state of New York where he wins at county fairs as a larger-than-life strongman, and even in Europe, where he is deployed for the US Army during World War II. We meet his daughter, Madeleine, who opens a successful chain of diners using the recipes from her grandmother, the original American Fiancée, and vows never to return to her hometown. And we end with her son Gabriel, another ladies' man in the family, who falls in love with a woman he follows to Berlin and discovers unexpected connections there to the Lamontagne family that re-frame the entire course of the events in the book.

An unholy marriage of John Irving and Gary Shteyngart with the irresistible whimsy of Elizabeth McCracken, The American Fiancée is a big, bold, wildly ambitious novel that introduces a dynamic new voice to contemporary literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: Feb 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9780062947475

Eric Dupont

Eric Dupont is an author, teacher and translator from Montreal. His French-language novel La Logeuse won the Combats des livres. He was a finalist for both the Prix littéraire France-Québec and the Prix des cinq continents. He was the winner of the Prix littéraire des collégiens and the Prix des libraires. His fourth novel, The American Fiancee was on the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist and was a finalist for the 2018 Governor General's Literary Award for translation.

Reviews for The American Fiancee

[ldvoorberg · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A Hundred Years of Solitude Charles Dickens set primarily in Quebec then Germany. A family epic with nuns, Germans, Tosca, and stories. The first half feels like related short stories (a la Gabriel Garcia Marquez) and then a more modern story with "chapters" emerges (a la John Irving and Charles Dickens). Stick with it though some parts are disjointed, bizarre, or surprising, but it becomes very captivating.

[danielstj · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This was a very interesting book. However, after the first part, I found that it lagged until a little after the halfway mark- where it proceeded to pick up with vigorous intensity and did not let go until the conclusion. Thus, it was a hard book to rate- but I feel that this is an accurate representation of what it is capable of. Very intriguing and I will surely read more by this author. It was time well spent.3 stars.