[3] The novel was also a finalist for the 2006 Canada Council for the Arts Governor General’s Literary Awards,[4] one of five books shortlisted for the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize—Canada's largest annual prize for fiction[2]—and was also one of four novels nominated for the 2006 ReLit Awards.

[2] The Immaculate Conception has been described as echoing "the writing of Edgar Allan Poe and Fyodor Dostoevsky" and illuminating the "sublime, the uncanny, and the horrific that burns at the core of ordinary lives".

[10] Set in the mid-1920s in the isolated, working-class parish of Nativité in East-end Montreal, the novel chronicles the aftermath of a deadly fire—75 people die when a neighborhood restaurant is burned to the ground by an arsonist.

The cast of characters includes a pianist, mortician, bank clerk, a clubfooted school teacher, demonic fire chief, demented lumberjack, and the bank clerk's father.

[11] Chronicling the "ordinary" lives after the inferno, the story gradually reveals a series of horrific events from the clerk's childhood[11] and ultimately the reader is reminded that some crimes will forever remain secrets.