When Aurora Montrealis first appeared a year ago, francophone readers embraced its multi-faceted reflection of post-referendum Quebec. A superb translation by Matt Cohen now allows anglophones to step through the looking glass to marvel, “Why, these people are just like us.” Sexier, better dressed, maybe, but mostly they just want harder – to be loved, to be valued, to have a place of their own outside of our “big, flabby bed.”

Proulx views Montreal through a prism of 27 stories about all shades and forms of its citizens. Her unapologetic didacticism is least successful in briefer slices of Montreal’s socioeconomic spectrum from Caribbo-Quebecker to displaced Mohawk, from Outremont snob to street person. Elsewhere the political subtext is an integral part of the work’s power and complexity. It is no coincidence that many stories concern parents who unquestionably love but, failing to supply what is most desired, must be cast off in the quest for selfhood and independence.

Proulx’s prose is well matched by Cohen, a writer with a fine ear for the resonances of the human heart. The marvellous dialogue comes through translation intact; at coruscating parties we hang on every assertion, every retort – to say nothing of every detail of the menu. Proulx sets up a world of ease, style, and taste against one of want and exclusion. Immigrants marvel at Montreal’s wealth, its stores like villages “except that they are more civilized and have more things.” At a four-star dinner a cynical journalist describes kissing a homeless man and seeing “his eyes light up: she has made him feel loved, human.” She continues irritably, “Of course, because he’s a man he’s been wanting it ever since, he wants more.”

Aurora Montrealis hits its full stride in the longer later stories. In the final one, a woman sits at the bedside of a dying anglo stranger. “French chick,” he sardonically calls her. She is intensely engaged in their 11th-hour conversations, their “strange blind date,” when abruptly he is gone, disintegrated. It is an unbearably poignant metaphor for Quebec’s attenuating relationship with Canada. Finishing this book, the reader is convinced Monique Proulx is yet another reason why Canada would be infinitely poorer without Quebec.