<DIV>A unique and powerful portrait of referendum and post-referendum Montreal. Published in Quebec in 1996, Aurora Montrealis shot to the top of the best-seller lists and confirmed Monique Proulx's position as one of the top Quebec fiction writers of her generation.<BR><BR>In all of these stories?about disintegrating relationships, yearning housewives, survivors of political and literary wars, people at the very centre of the Quebec dream and those excluded by it?the true hero is the city of Montreal itself, a rapidly changing, indefinable city, which not only provides the backdrop of its inhabitant's lives, but is the essential force with which they must deal.<BR></DIV>