Those who like their history light and their romance frothy will love Divided Passions by Michelle Tisseyre. The book spans 12 years in the life of the daughter of an MP from Quebec’s Gaspé region and his beautiful but extremely pious wife. It opens with 16-year-old Jeanne arriving at the Carmelite convent in Saint-Boniface, Manitoba. Her mother has planned a religious vocation for her, but Jeanne has neither the depth of faith nor the stamina for it. Instead, once back in an ordinary world being torn apart by the First World War, she marries one of her father’s political lieutenants in order to escape her mother’s shadow.

The story follows Jeanne as she endures the rage of her husband, a young lawyer who sets up his practice in Montreal. She has a child, loses one, and finally stumbles upon love. The book closes with her breaking away from her family, religion, and country.

In between Tisseyre skillfully weaves in political argument and historical fact. She tells us about the debate over conscription, about the struggle for the Irish to form Eire, about the status of blacks in Montreal, and about Canadian laws governing divorce and abortion.

Because the Montreal Jeanne finds herself in is Hugh MacLennan’s Montreal too, it is tempting to compare their work. The young doctor whom Jeanne falls for has the same idealistic streak as did MacLennan’s Norman Bethune clone in The Watch That Ends the Night, and Jeanne lives in the Square Mile, the neighbourhood peopled by the English elite that figures so largely in Two Solitudes. But where MacLennan was breaking ground in his depiction of Canadian realities, Tisseyre has written a popular novel filled with as much romance as social observation. She’s done her homework well: the descriptions of the formal balls greeting the Prince of Wales glow with details that must have come from careful reading of newspaper accounts.

The book was on the bestseller lists in Quebec for several months when it came out in French, and without a doubt there are many readers waiting for a sequel. The English version is skillfully translated by the author herself, a feat that is as remarkable as her book is engaging.