"October is set in the quiet Montreal suburb of Saint-Lambert, where the clash between the "two solitudes" came to a head in 1970 with the kidnapping and subsequent murder of Pierre Laporte by the FLQ. For the narrator, growing up in those days meant living through one of the darkest episodes in Canadian history--a time when army tanks rolled through the streets and bombings and other random acts of violence became "l'order du jour.