"With its explosive, poignant, funny and tragicstory and memorable characters, Les héritiers de la mine is an important novel … Through the destiny of this large family, the author talks about Abitibi, where she lives, and of its broken dreams and cheated workers, the blind power of multinationals, the disappearance of villages and families decimated. Her protagonists have the makings of heroes, the stuff to withstand adversity; they may be local heroes, but their fight is universal."
– Voir (translated from the French)

★Rights sold: Albanian, Arabic, German, Spanish & Catalan, Croatian, English, French pocket, Italian, Ukranian.
★From the author and translator of And the Birds Rained Down, a 2015 CBC Canada Reads selection.
★Winner of the 2015 Governor General's Literary Award for French-to-English Translation.
★An abandoned mine. A large family driven by honour. And a source of pain, buried deep in the ground.

We’re nothing like other families. We are self-made. We are an essence unto ourselves, unique and dissonant, the only members of our species. Livers of humdrum lives who flitted around us got their wings burned. We’re not mean, but we can bare our teeth. People didn’t hang around when a band of Cardinals made its presence known.

With twenty-one kids, the Cardinal family is a force of nature. And now, after not being in the same room for decades, they’re congregating to celebrate their father, a prospector who discovered the zinc mine their now-deserted hometown in northern Quebec was built around. But as the siblings tell the tales of their feral childhood, we discover that Angèle, the only Cardinal with a penchant for happiness, has gone missing – although everyone has pretended not to notice for years. Why the silence? What secrets does the mine hold?

After studying political science at Laval University, Jocelyne Saucier embarked on a journalistic career in Abitibi-Témiscamingue.

In 1996, she published La Vie comme une image, a novel finalist for the Governor General's Award. Les Héritiers de la mine, published in 2001, was a finalist for the Prix France-Québec. Jeanne sur les routes was published in 2006, this novel is inspired by the life of activist Jeanne Corbin and Bascule, a novel still unpublished to this day, was adapted for the theater by Productions Zybrides in 2007.

In 2011, Il pleuvait des oiseaux successively won the Prix des five continents de la francophonie, the Literary Prize for college students, the Prix France-Québec and the Prix Ringuet awarded by the Académie des lettres du Québec. This novel was also in the running for the Grand prix du livre de Montréal in 2011.

In 2019, Il pleuvait des oiseaux became a Quebec feature film directed and scripted by Louise Archambault. Adapted from the successful homonymous novel by Jocelyne Saucier, the feature film shot in the Montmorency Forest, stars Andrée Lachapelle, Gilbert Sicotte, Rémy Girard, Ève Landry, Marie-Ginette Guay, Patricia Nolin, Éric Robidoux, Kenneth Welsh and Louise Portal