In the first chapter of Du sommet d'un arbre (1986), a collection of autobiographical pieces written for CBC radio, Yves Beauchemin describes his childhood as a time of total freedom. He was born in the town of Noranda, Quebec, on 26 June 1941, but his first memories are those of the forests of northern Quebec where, at the age of five, he was taken to live by his parents. Beauchemin, his younger brother François, and his sister Danielle had the run of the small village of Clova, Abitibi, where his father, Jean-Marie Beauchemin, had accepted a job with a branch of the International Paper Company of New York.

From 1947 to 1953 Beauchemin attended the elementary school at Clova. As Beauchemin recalls, it was his mother, the former Thérèse Maurice, who "infected" him with "the reading virus." He devoured Jules Verne and other popular fiction, as well...