Quebec's secret biological warfare history

In this episode of the Explaining History Podcast, we are joined by award-winning French Canadian author Mireille Gagné to discuss her acclaimed novel, *Horsefly* – a powerful, genre-defying work inspired by a top‑secret biological warfare laboratory that operated on Québec's Grosse Île during the Second World War.

The novel draws on a forgotten chapter of shared Allied history. In 1942, British, American, and Canadian forces established a clandestine facility on Grosse Île – an island in the St. Lawrence River that had previously served as a quarantine station for European immigrants. Their mission: to develop anthrax as a weapon o...