My focus as a novelist is literary fiction with a marked global cultural and political edge. It addresses the themes of exile and search for identity, multiculturalism, and global geopolitics and their impact on both individuals and communities. Set within an extensive thematic and ideological frame, my fiction falls within the general trend of forward-looking, thought-provocative socio-political novels. The protagonists are drifting characters, with a deep sense of commitment and an uncompromising gaze on both themselves and their universe. They are passionate individuals, fraught with moral and ideological dilemmas and moved by a pronounced sense of freedom and justice. They relinquish their familiar environment, often with fracas, and set out on a search for self-fulfillment and a higher sense of existence. Gradually, their experiences open up to a wider universal quest that compels them to drastic choices.
Babel of Hope. A novel (summary)
When he slams the door and flees rashly family constraints and the Mullahs of Ashland, Massy thinks that his nightmares are definitively over. He is wrong, in fact, for further darkness and more demons are lying in wait for him in his dreamland. And yet, sheltered as he is by bookish idealistic homilies and myths of progress, he learns of these demons only slowly, step by step, shred by shred. He learns of them through the enchanting city’s monuments and squares, through his friend and guardian-angel, Marc, a survivor of the Holocaust; he sees them through his fellow students and teachers, particularly Professor Lumière; he discovers them through his romantic relations, and when he finally experiences them at firsthand, right in the flesh, in contact with the ruthless, Machiavellian Martin de la Roncière, his eroded ideals begin to crumble one by one; worse still, drama soon sets in, threatening to destroy his life and what counts most in his eyes – his love for Marianne. And here precisely begins his dramatic story of commitment, in spite of himself, unprepared; more yet, hereon commences that capital and unpredictable battle of his life against those white demons of his new world, whose political agenda turns out to be as gruesome, if not ghastlier than the dark monsters he fled years earlier.
Currently, I am working on The Cup of Fortune, a social satire set in Montreal and New York.