Imbued with Roy's brand of compassion and understanding, this story focuses on a family in the Saint-Henri slums of Montreal, its struggles to overcome poverty and ignorance, and its search for love.

A story of familial tenderness, sacrifice, and survival during World War II, The Tin Flute won both the Governor General's Award and the Prix Femina of France.

It was originally published in French as Bonheur d'occasion (literally, "secondhand happiness"), which represents the character's sense of rebound love in the novel.

Published in English as The Tin Flute in 1947, the book also won the 1947 Governor General's Award for fiction as well as the Royal Society of Canada's Lorne Pierce Medal.

Distributed in the United States, where it sold more than three-quarters of a million copies, the Literary Guild of America made The Tin Flute a featured book of the month in 1947.

The story takes place in Montreal, principally in the poor neighbourhood of Saint-Henri, between February 1940 and May 1940, during the Second World War, when Quebec is still suffering from the Great Depression.

Her mother, Rose-Anna, stays home to take care of her eleven children while Florentine's father, Azarius, struggles to maintain a job due to his perpetual unhappiness.

Rose-Anna is, in some ways, a victim of circumstance with a husband who has no work, poverty that causes her to go searching for new lodging every spring, and her Catholic faith that does not allow her to use birth control and results in many pregnancies which take their toll on her both physically and emotionally.