Page "Gabrielle Roy" Paragraph 3

Her first novel, Bonheur d ' occasion ( 1945 ), gave a starkly realistic portrait of the lives of people in Saint-Henri, a working-class neighbourhood of Montreal.

The novel caused many Quebeckers to take a hard look at themselves, and is regarded as the novel that helped lay the foundation for Quebec's Quiet Revolution of the 1960s.

The original French version won her the prestigious Prix Femina in 1947.

Published in English as The Tin Flute ( 1947 ), the book won the 1947 Governor General's Award for fiction as well as the Royal Society of Canada's Lorne Pierce Medal.

Distributed in the United States, where it sold more than three-quarters of a million copies, the Literary Guild of America made The Tin Flute a feature book of the month in 1947.

The book garnered so much attention that Roy returned to Manitoba to escape the publicity.