Felicity's Fool

Felicity's Fool, by François Gravel (Cormorant), is a novel with history and science in it, and both the history and the science are very good. Its protagonist is a mild-mannered doctor driven to search for the organ of happiness in the human brain. The time is a hundred years ago, the place, St. Jean de Dieu, a Montreal asylum run by the indomitable real-life Soeur Thérèse-de Jésus. This is a true sleeper of a book: you do not know that you are being compelled by it until you try to stop reading; at the end you will find yourself wishing that history were the fiction presented here, if you aren't secretly convinced that it is. Not only that, the author manages brilliantly to present the first fifty-three years of his protagonist's life in a mere fourteen pages. Very highly recommended.