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Mona Awad launches Rouge with Heather O’Neill and a special No Joy solo set
13 September at 18:30
Wednesday, Sept 13, 6:30 pm
On September 13th, Librairie Drawn and Quarterly will be hosting a captivating event for the launch of Mona Awad’s upcoming novel, Rouge, featuring Montreal’s coup de coeur Heather O’Neill as well as an experimental solo performance by a local shoegaze artist, No Joy.
The evening will take place at La Sotteranea at 4848 St Laurent Blvd H2T 1R5 on Wednesday, September 13th, and will feature a special No Joy solo set, a reading, a conversation, an audience Q&A, and a signing.
Doors: 6:30pm
Show: 7:00pm
Tickets
Ticket deal! Free entry to the event with a purchase of Rouge!
Buy tickets here: https://www.venuepilot.co/events/81344/orders/new
Book + ticket purchasers can pick up their copy of Rouge at the launch. Tickets also available in store at Librairie Drawn & Quarterly.
Books will be on sale at the event and the author will be signing.
Ticket Giveaway
QWF is delighted to partner with Librairie Drawn & Quarterly to offer two free tickets to our members (one ticket each)!
To enter the giveaway, email John Wickham at john@qwf.org with your full name and with “Giveaway” in the subject line.
The deadline to enter is Sunday, September 10. The names of the winners will be drawn on Monday, September 11.
About Rouge
From the critically acclaimed author of Bunny comes a horror-tinted, gothic fairy tale about a lonely dress shop clerk whose mother’s unexpected death sends her down a treacherous path in pursuit of youth and beauty. Can she escape her mother’s fate—and find a connection that is more than skin deep?
For as long as she can remember, Belle has been insidiously obsessed with her skin and skincare videos. When her estranged mother Noelle mysteriously dies, Belle finds herself back in Southern California, dealing with her mother’s considerable debts and grappling with lingering questions about her death. The stakes escalate when a strange woman in red appears at the funeral, offering a tantalizing clue about her mother’s demise, followed by a cryptic video about a transformative spa experience. With the help of a pair of red shoes, Belle is lured into the barbed embrace of La Maison de Méduse, the same lavish, culty spa to which her mother was devoted. There, Belle discovers the frightening secret behind her (and her mother’s) obsession with the mirror—and the great shimmering depths (and demons) that lurk on the other side of the glass.
Snow White meets Eyes Wide Shut in this surreal descent into the dark side of beauty, envy, grief, and the complicated love between mothers and daughters. With black humor and seductive horror, Rouge explores the cult-like nature of the beauty industry—as well as the danger of internalizing its pitiless gaze. Brimming with California sunshine and blood-red rose petals, Rouge holds up a warped mirror to our relationship with mortality, our collective fixation with the surface, and the wondrous, deep longing that might lie beneath.
Mona Awad is the author of Bunny, named a Best Book of 2019 by TIME, Vogue, and the New York Public Library. It was a finalist for the New England Book Award and a Goodreads Choice Award. It is currently optioned for film with Bad Robot Productions. Awad’s debut, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, winner of the Colorado Book Award and the Amazon Canada First Novel Award. Her most recent novel, All’s Well, was longlisted for the International Dublin Award and a finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award for Best Horror. Rouge, her fourth novel, is forthcoming September 2023 with Simon & Schuster. She teaches fiction in the Creative Writing program at Syracuse University and is based in Boston.
Heather O’Neill is a novelist, short-story writer and essayist. Her bestselling novel The Lonely Hearts Hotel won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and CBC’s Canada Reads. Her previous work, which includes Lullabies for Little Criminals, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night and Daydreams of Angels, has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize two years in a row. She has won CBC’s Canada Reads and the Danuta Gleed Award. Born and raised in Montreal, O’Neill lives there with her daughter.
Since first arriving on the scene in 2009 with blistering inversions of shoegaze, Montreal’s No Joy has always found formidable ways to reinvent itself. Now solely composed of musician Jasamine White-Gluz, No Joy has evolved over the course of four studio albums and five EPs, defying expectation and genre, and cementing itself as something rare: a band without a category.
Librairie Drawn & Quarterly would like to acknowledge that their events and bookstores are located on the unceded territory of the Kanien’kehá:ka. Many of us refer to Montreal as our home, but it is named Tiohtiá:ke. It has always been a gathering place for many First Nations and continues to be home to a diverse population of Indigenous peoples. We are grateful that creating and sharing stories has been a part of this land for thousands of years.
La Sotteranea is located in the basement down a flight of stairs (approximately 38 steps). There are gender neutral washrooms which are not wheelchair accessible. Anyone needing assistance accessing our space can contact the venue as they are more than happy to try and accommodate people to the best of their ability.