"Rosine is surrounded by ghosts: of her family, her past loves, an old Montreal and its politics. She's haunted by the shale pit workers who, in the 1880's, frequented the Crystal Palace grounds upon whose site her Mile-End triplex sits, as well as by an ancient Parisian gendarme lurking in her stairwell and by her dead maternal family, restless from a lifetime of denial of their Indigenous ancestry. It's possible that Rosine herself is a ghost - after all, it's not like her to miss a therapy session. But the Obituary is no whodunnit. As the evanescent Rosine's narrative splinters into three - a prurient fly buzzing over the action, a politically correct historian and a woman on a bus or lying in bed - the central question becomes one of who speaks when we speak. With irrepressible verve, this kaleidoscopic mystery about the crooked itinerary of assimilation under duress in Montréal and the West catapults the novel form into the millennium."--Inside front cover.