The Harmattan Winds

by Sylvain Trudel, Donald Winkler (translator)

An audacious and playful debut novel of adventure, brotherhood, and the search for a homeland — a contemporary classic of Quebecois literature.

Written with uncommon wit, The Harmattan Winds is a feast of wordplay, rife with puns and wonder – perfect for devotees of Ali Smith, classic adventure novels like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and John Knowles’s A Separate Peace.

Hidden in the reeds floating on a pond next to the highway, a woman finds a baby bobbing in a shopping basket. Adopted by the Francoeurs, Hugues remains an outsider in his semi-family. At the same time, Habéké is adopted by a Canadian family and brought to Quebec after his own family dies of famine in Ethiopia. On the margins of their small town, the boys become sworn brothers, searching for their roots, desperate to return to exile, to a paradise called Ityopia.

Narrated by the bold and imaginative voice of Hugues, Sylvain Trudel’s prize-winning debut novel is at times serious and at times fantastical. In their child’s world, where Hugues and Habéké haven’t yet learned the prejudices of adults, they embark on adventures, digging holes to China and building fantastical contraptions to take them to far off places, like their hero, explorer Roald Amundsen.

Genres: Fiction, Canada, Literary Fiction

172 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 2025

Reviews

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 4 out of 5]

With the spirit of a fairy tale, yet firmly grounded in small town Quebec in the early 1970s, this short novel, originally published in 1986, captures the childhood misadventures of two boys, both orphaned and adopted, in a time before video games and computers. The narrator, Hugues, is a foundling discovered abandoned in a shopping cart at the age of six months who only learns of his bastard nature when he overhears his adaptive (his word) semi-parents talking one night. His best friend, blood brother and partner in adventure is Habéké, a survivor of famine in Ethiopia whose foreignness is immediately obvious. His adoptive parents do everything they can to turn him into a good Canadian boy, but Africa, its myths, legends, and the memory of his ancestors is deeply woven into his character—and a good part of the crazy schemes he and Hugues concoct. There is a longing for found family, for an ideal of exile, and for a magic world in both boys. Add to this our young narrator's obsession with the florid and overwrought poetry of a fictional poet, and you have a narrative that is laced with language Hugues misunderstands and often misspells, and filled with all the drama, tragedy and romance his young mind can conjure. Youthful narrators can be hit or miss, but this is a classic—now finally available in English translation.
A longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2025/04/02/i-...

[Annie Tate Cockrum · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful coming of age story about two young boys growing up in Canada - they’re drawn to each other because they’re both adopted and they stand out in their predominately white community (one is Black and one is Asian). They bond about creating a new world in which they would feel at home and accepted. The book feels a little bit like an adventure novel - I’ve never read the Hardy Boys but this is similar to how I imagine it. They go on adventures and enact these very far fetched ideas but they have the purest intentions. I really like books from the point of view of children, particularly children who are causing some sort of ruckus. 4.5

The Harmattan Winds comes out on April 1st of this year and I think it would be foolish to let this book pass you by!

[Magpie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didnt like this book until the barrel part, the barrel part was ok

[Ty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kind of like if Maniac Magee had been a mystically insane Canadian poet.

[Gideonleek · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not good

[Five · Rating 2 out of 5]

My first impression was that I loved the writing style. But my second impression was that the writing tends towards tokenizing the women in the novel and exoticizing the Black main character in a way that is frequently intensely uncomfortable. Also, goes very haywire and dark near the end in a way that is surprising and strange in a way I personally disliked but you may enjoy if you like things that are strange to the point of being nonsensical.

[Sarah Holz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Trudel’s prose is as inventive and intriguing as promised, but frankly I’m baffled by the jacket copy that seems to find this ultimately rather dark coming of age story a whimsical paean to boyhood. And I understand that Hughes is definitely an unreliable narrator, and characters can hold opinions and viewpoints that are not necessarily endorsed by the author, but Hughes’ (positively meant) continual exoticism of Habéké’s Blackness/Africaness makes for an often uncomfortable read, as it is never addressed by the narrative. A strange, often interesting, novella, but not quite the “playful” fantasy it is advertised as—unless you take the very literal Grimm-style version of that descriptor.

[Alison Hardtmann · Rating 3 out of 5]

We didn't understand the poem very well, but we loved the words that descended, it seemed to us, like water drops into a torture chamber. One day, we told ourselves, one fine day, we would understand, that was certain, and we couldn't wait.

Hughes feels like an outsider in his own family. He had been found in a shopping cart in a ditch as an infant, and his parents took him in as they thought they could have no children of their own. But, as sometimes happens, Hughes ended up with two younger siblings and thinks that his family would prefer to be without him. He then meets Habéké, who had lived in Ethiopia until he was nine, and was then adopted by a white Québécois couple during the famine. As two outsiders, they quickly become best friends and run wild together. At first, their adventures mean selling decorated shells to people in their summer cottages, but as their shared fantasies of an imaginary Africa grow, those adventures take a dangerous turn.

The Harmattan Winds is written from the point of view of a fourteen year old boy, but a fourteen year old with the soul of a forty year old beat poet. Both boys are influenced by an imaginary poet they can't understand and the idea that they should be living wild in Africa, free from school and parents and other authority figures. Trudel presents this as the ideal, and for a time, at least when they are spending their summer in a cottage in the countryside, it seems largely harmless. Trudel puts the narration firmly in Hughes's head, letting him describe the ideas and motivations that drive he and his friend, in a way that makes the dangerousness of their exploits clear, even as Hughes tries to make them sound reasonable. Hughes's voice is certainly remarkable and how well you respond to the writing style will determine how much you enjoy this book.

[Ian, etc. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Occasionally endearing, predominantly insane, *The Harmattan Winds* is not the kind of book you think it is.

Here’s the same problem as *The Singularity,* this time with a lighter touch, something between *Tom Sawyer* and *The Florida Project.* Identity and escapism and what it is like to be the child displaced from their home. The violences this creates. Worth discussing — but maybe not this way. Teetering constantly between sophistication and obscenity, innocence and hellish culpability. A book that feels sure of itself, but wrongly. Confident and competent and concerning. Good poetry, bad time reading.

[Georgie Harwell · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writing style of this was tough - from a 14 year old aspiring poet / impressionable young boy’s point of view. It’s hard to tell what is real and there were moments of greatness, but you had to slog through weird poetry and the world’s longest sentences. Ready to talk about this at book group.

[CanadianReader · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had neither the interest nor the energy to wade very far into this bizarre book. Not impenetrable if you’re prepared to work. I was not.

[Tim Scritchfield · Rating 2 out of 5]

*2.5

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

An alternately sweet and disturbing fable about found family, fantasy, and belonging.