L’Immaculée Conception, Gaétan Soucy’s first novel originally published in 1994, is set in East End Montreal in the early twenties. Scarred and broken, Remouald Tremblay is no longer the curious and gifted boy he was in his youth. At thirty-three, he leads a mediocre existence, working in a bank and caring for his quadriplegic step-father. That is until the fire at the Alouette Grill. His step-father, whom he obeys with cheerless diligence, forces him to go walking on the site of the fire. It is there that events he has tried desperately to forget will come back to haunt him: twenty years before, he unwittingly participated in a crime so heinous as to defy description.
L’Immaculée Conception is a disquieting novel which examines the destructive action of a collective culture morbidly centered on the notions of sin, guilt and improbable forgiveness.