National Network for Equitable Library Service

'In this singular story dedicated to the mother, the narrator creates an avatar to counter her pain of living. Karoline Georges manages to combine the real and the virtual around the complexity of family ties. The author approaches loneliness and representation of the body with astonishing lucidity. The Imago Stage transcends genres in an intelligent and powerful prose.' - Governor General's Literary Award Jury. Growing up with a menacing drunk for a father and a grief-stricken mother, a girl spends her 1980s childhood staring at the television to escape the tension, depression, and looming violence that fill her suburban home. After winning a modelling competition, she dedicates herself to becoming a placid image onto which anything can be projected, a blank slate with a blank stare. Earning enough in Paris to retire in her twenties, she buys a studio in Montreal and retreats from the world and its perceived threats, cultivating her existence as an image through her virtual reality avatar. But when her mother develops cancer and nears the end of her life, our narrator is forced to leave her cocoon - surrounded by her posse of augmented reality superheroes - and interact with the world and her parents without the mask of her perfect, virtual self. A catalogue of the anxieties of an age - from nuclear war to terrorism, climate change to biological warfare - set in the past and not-too-distant future of Montreal, The Imago Stage is an ominous tale of oppression, suppression, and disembodiment.