A novel dramatizing the various and often conflicting ways members of an English-speaking Montreal family try to understand and cope with the Referendum crisis of 1980 in Quebec, The Restoration is one of the few literary looks Canada has at those formative and turbulent years. And with its primary motif of the burning of historic buildings and the destruction of a Canadian political legacy, The Restoration says a good deal about the tensions that continue to beset the country.
"A good, solid novel, something rich and important...." That's what the American novelist Elizabeth Spencer had to say about the book. Wrote The Globe and Mail in its review: "Keith Henderson knows most intimately those parts of the anglo-Quebec community who have been most abused by recent Canadian history, the marginal middle class citizenry of places like Roxboro." As Canada grapples with the current instalment of its lingering cultural and constitutional crisis, The Restoration adds a special and indispensable dimension to the national political discourse.
