With one side in Mile End and the other in Outremont, Hutchison Street is inhabited by characters from many different backgrounds, including a community of Hasidim and a writer whose newest project is a novel about the people she has lived among for thirty-nine years. She traces the life stories of an aging singer, a bag-lady who feeds birds in a back alley, an Italian widow who grows tomatoes in her front yard, a Jamaican woman who longs to dance the night away, and a young Hasidic girl who keeps a diary. A moving account of isolated individuals attempting to reach out to one another in one of Montreal's most diverse neighbourhoods.
Judith Woodsworth is Professor of translation and translation studies in the French Studies Department at Concordia University. She has translated two novels, Still Lives by Pierre Nepveu and Hutchison Street by Abla Farhoud. She lives in Montreal.
"A lesson in tolerance, this novel is also a tribute to books — all books: crime fiction, the Torah, the Bible, the private journal, the cookbook. To the books that bind us together." — Christian Desmeules