The plot of Quebec writer Anne Hébert’s final novel, A Suit of Light, sounds melodramatic when put down in plain, flat English. Rose-Alba and Pedro Almevida and their son Miguel are Spanish immigrants in Paris. They don’t have enough money; she wants excitement; he beats her up when she dyes her hair. Miguel feels he should have been a girl, and falls in love with a black male dancer whom his mother also sees as a symbol of the glamorous life. Trouble, inevitably, follows.

But the book is not just a slightly twisted journey into the lives of people on the margins of society. Throughout her long career Hébert, who died last winter, masterfully told stories of uncommon passion in precise and poetic language, and this slim book is no exception. A suit of light is what a Spanish bullfighter wears, covered with mirrors to dazzle both bull and spectators. Rose-Alba imagines her son wearing one on the first page, and at the book’s end he says that someone is preparing one for him “in secret, in the midst of the waves and grey ripples, for when I’ll have arrived among the dead.” In between, images of light and darkness haunt the characters’ hopeless dreams.

Sheila Fischman, who previously translated six of Hébert’s books, once again deftly captures the author’s rhythms, symbols, and emotional depth. In an afterword she says that the translation has been a labour of love: “she has left me, she has left all her readers, with a vision of a world in which, despite prevailing darkness, the ultimate victor is light.” Last year Hébert’s Am I Disturbing You? became the first work in translation to make the shortlist for the Giller Prize, while over the years she won fistfuls of awards for her poetry, novels, and stories as they were published in French. A Suit of Light is a fine finale to an extraordinary career.