Perfect Timing!

Content : A timely release for Breast Cancer Awareness Month, this bold and moving graphic novel offers an intimate, funny and deeply human perspective on breast cancer, motherhood and womanhood.

Marie is eight months pregnant when she feels a lump in her breast. She discovers that it is breast cancer when she gives birth. Caught between the urgency of an induced labour and the brutality of the news, Marie refuses to give in to despair. Rather than turning this intruder into an enemy, her survival strategy transforms the cancerous lump into a pearl — a strangely beautiful and painful pearl.

This graphic novel chronicles Marie’s long journey, an intimate experience that enables her to deconstruct the social expectations imposed on mothers, women and people living with illness.

Infused with her disarming sense of humour, her story is brought vividly to life by her friend Loïcia’s predominantly black-and-white, yet remarkably luminous, visual world.

Author and illustrator: Loïcia Mood, illustrator and visual artist with a degree in art history, has developed a surreal, colourful world in which images strike with the evocative force of Liv Strömquist’s work. Marie Curvale, a feminist writer, places the intimate at the heart of her stories, exploring the upheavals of life. Together, they have transformed the experience of breast cancer, which Marie went through shortly after giving birth, into a sensitive, funny and necessary graphic novel.