Imagine a 16th-century society belle turned Robinson Crusoe, a female Don Quixote with an Inuit Sancho Panza, and you'll have an inkling of what's in store in Douglas Glover's outrageously modern historical novel. Mysterious, mystical, and thoroughly original, Elle is lusty, subversive riff on the discovery of the New World at the moment of first contact.

Based on a true story, Elle chronicles the ordeals of a young Frenchwoman marooned on the desolate Isle of Demons during Jacques Cartier's last, ill-fated attempt to colonize North America. In a carnal whirlwind of myth and story, of death, lust, and love, of beauty and hilarity, Glover brings the past violently and unexpectedly into the present.