One eRead Canada
This cross-Canada, bilingual digital book club runs in April. During this month, users can get instant access to the pick of the year.
The 2025 book is Valid by Chris Bergeron.
About the Book
A genre-bending speculative look at a dark future, Valid shares the story of one trans woman leading a revolution.
This is a mutiny.
If our mutiny is to succeed, I must name things well, without diversion. Lacking this, you will not deviate from your certainties.
Here it is: I am trans.
As in transgression. I have broken genres. I have removed myself from the rules.
I am trans.
As in translation. I have dragged the elements that make up my person from one state to another. My geometry is variable.
And tonight, I am a revolution.
/warning: code red… fetch-query protocol enabled… transmission failed… standby/
Set in a disturbingly transfigured Montreal in the year 2050, Valid is a monologue delivered over the span of eight hours by Christelle, a seventy-year-old trans woman forced to live as a man in order to survive. Speaking to her captor, an ever–more powerful AI, she turns the tables and mounts her own revolution by showing her truest self. Part autofiction, part dystopic speculation on an all-too-possible future characterized by corporate power, ecological collapse, and political havoc, Valid is an ambitious work that is as much philosophical as it is confessional.
House of Anansi Press
Chris Bergeron
Chris Bergeron is diverse and fluid: after beginning a career in journalism and eventually winding up at the helm of the weekly cultural magazine Voir, she now dedicates her artistic vitality to Cossette, a leading global marketing agency.
She offers speaking engagements on leadership, diversity, inclusion, and trans rights.
Chris lives in Montreal.
House of Anansi Press
About the Translator
Natalia Hero
Natalia Hero is a Montreal-based writer and literary translator. She holds a B.A. in English and Spanish literature from Concordia University and an M.A. in literary translation from the University of Ottawa.
You can read her short fiction in places like Peach Mag, Shabby Doll House, Cosmonauts Avenue, and The Temz Review. She translates works from French and Spanish into English. Her debut novella Hum, published in 2018 by Metatron Press, is now available in French as Colibri (Marchand de feuilles, 2020).
