The Hollow Beast

Winner of the 2025 French-American Translation Prize in Fiction. Finalist for the 2024 Governor General's Literary Award in Translation. A Globe and Mail Most Anticipated Spring Title.

Don Quixote meets Who Framed Roger Rabbit in this slapstick epic about destiny, family demons, and revenge.

1911. A hockey game in Quebec's Gaspé Peninsula. With the score tied two-two in overtime, local tough guy Billy Joe Pictou fires the puck directly into Monti Bouge's mouth. When Pictou's momentum carries them both across the goal line in a spray of shattered teeth, Victor Bradley, erstwhile referee and local mailman, rules that the goal counts—and Monti's ensuing revenge for this injustice sprawls across three generations, one hundred years, and dozens of dastardly deeds.

Fuelled by a bottomless supply of Yukon, the high-proof hooch that may or may not cause the hallucinatory sightings of a technicolor beast that haunts not just Monti but his descendants, it's up to Monti's grandson, François—and his floundering doctoral dissertation—to make sense of the vendetta that's shaped the destiny of their town and everyone in it.

Brilliantly translated into slapstick English by Lazer Lederhendler, The Hollow Beast introduces Christophe Bernard as a master of epic comedy.