Christiane Frenette’s novel The Whole Night Through is proof that it’s not the story that’s important, it’s the way you tell it. One November afternoon a dying moose comes out of the woods into Jeanne’s yard in the mountains of southeastern Quebec, and as she settles down to keep the animal company as it dies, she reflects on the events that have brought her here.

Jeanne had not intended to settle there. She had originally come to comfort a college friend, Gabrielle, disabled in a hit-and-run accident. Gabrielle’s brother Paul falls in love with Jeanne and the two have a child. All is idyllic until they discover the identity of the hit-and-run driver. Jeanne is waiting to see if Paul has gone off to kill him when the dying moose arrives.

Told that way, the story sounds clumsy, and the dying moose a symbol that somehow escaped from an allegory. Frenette, however, has a deft narrative touch. She intercuts vivid observations of the gathering night – long shadows, dry yellow grass, the wind in the trees – with the slow unfolding of Jeanne’s story. Her anguish, the great beast’s proud death, the silence of the forest, the moral ambiguities of rage, love, and forgiveness: Frenette creates a world that haunts us from the first page.

Frenette’s previous novel, Terra Firma, won the 1998 Governor General’s Award for French fiction, while her poetry has won the Prix Octave-Crémazie and been nominated for the French poetry Governor General’s Award. Here Sheila Fischman has done a superb job of translating Frenette’s latest tale into English that is both lyrical and brusquely concrete.