“Yes, Montreal is a great North American city, with one thing that sets it apart from the other metropolises on the continent: its beating heart has always been French.”

Suddenly called back to her hometown to say farewell to her ailing father, Perrine finds herself thrust into a Montreal redolent with memories, with associations, with historical and familial anecdotes. As she crosses it on foot, in a final homage to her father, trying to articulate to herself just why he loved it so much, she finds a familiar place revealing itself to her anew: a city she had to leave before she could speak of it properly. 

As she makes her way across the city’s arrondissements and neighborhoods, from its Old Port to its Back River, she settles her unfinished business with a place indelibly marked by conflict, by bilingualism, by potholes and birds—a free and proud city that shows more or less what North America would be like if everyone spoke French.

More than just a homecoming, Montreal is a leisurely flânerie, an emotional reckoning with personal history, and a psychogeographic guide to the many enclaves, subcultures, traditions, and strengths of a city battered but unbowed by its complex history.


Translated from the Québécois French by Rhonda Mullins


Part of Travel with a Writer, The Walking Tree's global literary travel series pairing acclaimed writers with the cities and places they know intimately. Combining literary essays and fiction, original infographics, curated walks, and beautiful design, each volume is a literary companion to place, designed to be read in a single sitting. Together, the series forms a growing literary atlas of the world.