"This grandiose text, as a call to open our eyes, finds a particular echo in the society in which we live today."
—L’Utopie, Paris

"Gimme Shelter is not strictly about a survival story. The tone is lyrical, the poetry omnipresent and the subject matter militant."
—La Presse

★Rights sold: French, German, World Spanish, Italian and Swedish.
★Finalist - Prix Jovette-Bernier 2018
Finalist - Prix Hors Concours 2021
Finalist - Prix Mots en marge 2022
Finalist - Prix Folio-Télérama 2022
Finalist - Prix des lecteurs détendus(France) 2022

A voyage deep into the woods and deep into oneself. A quest for meaning, far from civilization. It is a return to the source. Anouk takes the reader on a pilgrimage to revisit her settler roots, with the rigours of winter and a collection of poets to keep her from losing her way.

Gimme Shelter is the first opus of an ecofeminist triptych, infused in nature writing influences, followed by Feral and Basecamp.

Anouk has traded her cozy Montreal apartment for a run-down cabin in the woods of Kamouraska. She leaves everything behind to start over. Far from cities. Far from pollution. Far from overconsumption madness. Shut up far from everything during the harshest of winters, she writes about the transformation happening within her as a way to master her frugal lifestyle and chase away her fears.

Her story comes to us in the form of a logbook, complete with lists and sketches. A novel that questiones the frenetic pace of urban lifestyles.

Gabrielle Filteau-Chiba was born in 1987 in Montreal, the daughter of a language teacher and a medical translator. She studied at Laval University and graduated in 2010.

She then worked as a translator. In 2013, she left her job and the hustle and bustle of Montreal to live in a log cabin in the Kamouraska region, on the banks of the river of the same name, without electricity, running water, or cell service, surrounded by coyotes and bears. The first winter was one of solitude and a return to nature, but also of peace. Later, she became involved with a group of environmentalists fighting against an oil pipeline project[1], and moved in with a lover in a house built next to her cabin. They have a daughter.

She also became a municipal councillor for Saint-Bruno-de-Kamouraska in a 2016 by-election, was re-elected in 2017, and resigned in 2019. A few years later, she temporarily moved back closer to Montreal so that her daughter could attend school. She also devoted herself to writing, initially for activist purposes, to share her convictions about the need to protect nature through novels that were both committed and poetic.