Jason Paquet-Garceau’s book will enter circulation on July 20, 2026. This chronicle announces the opening of preorders and presents what this narrative adds to the memory of the Saguenay flood in Quebec and beyond.
Book coverEntre Chaos et Lumière
Jason Paquet-Garceau
A duty of remembrance about loss, trauma, rebuilding, and the refusal of forgetting.
Quick preorder access
Official publication is set for July 20, 2026. The book can already be located and preordered through Amazon ahead of its broader circulation.
Also available by request in bookstores.
Why this book matters now
This publication does not present itself as a simple return to an old news event. It opens a space of truth, memory, and rebuilding from a story lived from the inside.
Entre Chaos et Lumière begins from an intimate loss, yet it never remains locked inside the private sphere. Jason Paquet-Garceau tells what a life becomes after a historic tragedy took a brother, a sister, a home, and part of childhood itself.
The book speaks about grief, trauma, mental health, survivor’s guilt, memory, masculinity, and slow reconstruction. It also speaks about love, fidelity, and the need to keep Mathieu and Andrea’s names whole within history.
Universal reach. This book begins in Saguenay, but it speaks to anyone who has ever known loss, trauma, injustice, or the need to rebuild. Even without having lived through the Saguenay flood, anyone can recognize what it means to lose, to carry injustice, to try to stand back up, to search for meaning, and to keep living with what does not disappear.
Family archiveJason, Mathieu, and Andrea before the flood. The chronicle keeps that human dimension at the center of the story.Memory of the tragedyThe memorial cross reminds us that behind a historic catastrophe there are lives, a family, and a memory that still has to be carried forward.
In memory of Mathieu and Andrea
The book exists for this as well: to give faces, names, and a full place back to Mathieu and Andrea Paquet-Garceau, beyond the news item, beyond the archive, beyond silence.
MathieuAndrea
Back cover
Back-cover summary
The book presents itself as an intimate yet universal Quebec testimony carried by memory and the refusal of forgetting.
At five years old, I lost my brother and sister on a night when everything changed. Our family home was swept away by the Saguenay flood, a national tragedy that left its mark across Quebec and left behind a silence impossible to fill.
But not every disaster is the work of chance. Behind the rain were human decisions, negligence, and responsibilities avoided. Their deaths carved an immense void inside me, a fracture that redefined my life as a man.
In this deeply moving autobiographical account, I trace the path from a shattered childhood, trauma, and mental health struggles to the long and difficult road of rebuilding. Entre Chaos et Lumière is not only the story of surviving a tragedy; it is a duty of remembrance and a lesson in resilience.
The Saguenay flood and the missing part of the story
Flood archivesMaterial damage in Chicoutimi during the Saguenay flood, July 1996. Source: Wikimedia Commons / Jeannot Levesque.The Little White HouseThe Little White House, which became one of the enduring symbols of the Saguenay flood. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
What happened
In July 1996, torrential rains triggered floods and landslides that swept away homes, shattered families, and left a lasting mark on Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean.
Public impact
The tragedy moved beyond the region. It struck all of Quebec, and even Canada, through its scale, its images, its human losses, and the debates it left on safety, responsibility, and rebuilding.
What this book adds
Public history often tells the catastrophe, the damage, and the reconstruction. This book tells what the disaster continued to do inside a survivor, a family, and a man’s life.
The collective memory of the flood already exists, but it still leaves in the shadows the intimate aftermath, the psychological consequences, and the emotional truth of those who had to live on afterward.
We know the images of the disaster, the cut roads, the destroyed homes, the mud, the tolls, and the reports. We know much less about the long duration of trauma: hypervigilance, mental exhaustion, survivor’s guilt, unanswered questions, the impact on becoming a man, and the refusal to let the dead be reduced to a formula.
The book’s contribution. This narrative brings the voice of the surviving child now grown up, the place of mental health, the question of masculinity, and remembrance as an act of transmission. It does not replace the collective memory of the flood: it completes it by making it more human, more whole, and more universally recognizable.
Companion readingIl y a 25 ans, le déluge
Mikaël Lalancette
A testimony-based volume that helps measure the historical and collective scale of the tragedy.
A necessary complement to Il y a 25 ans, le déluge
Mikaël Lalancette’s book helped gather and transmit many major testimonies around the flood. Jason’s book stands as a direct complement to that work of remembrance.
Mikaël Lalancette’s work helps situate the flood within a broader public memory. Entre Chaos et Lumière, meanwhile, goes further into the intimate part of the disaster: what it did to a sibling bond, a family, a childhood, and later to adulthood.
In that sense, the two books are in dialogue. One gathers collective memory. The other opens an inner chamber, that of a survivor taking the floor so that Mathieu and Andrea remain more than names inside the archive.
Entre Chaos et Lumière
