Author(s): Emmanuelle Pagano

Short Stories | France | Translated fiction | Fiction Reductions

Description: Meetings, partings, loves and losses in rural France are dissected with compassion. The late wedding guest isn't your cousin but a drunken chancer. The driver who gives you a lift isn't going anywhere but off the road. Snow settles on your car in the middle of summer and the glitter found between the pages of a borrowed novel takes you into another world. Pagano's stories weave together the mad, the mysterious and the dispossessed in rural France with honesty and humour. This is a superb cumulative collection from a unique French voice.

Review: `Pagano succeeds because of the range of her insight and the skill with which she shifts register: from wistfulness to blunt force, or from fantasy to naturalism.' CHRIS POWER, THE GUARDIAN `Endlessly beautiful and poignant.' LE MONDE BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2012 `Devastatingly beautiful.' LE SOIR, BELGIUM

Prizes: Winner of Prix des Lyceens 2012. Short-listed for Prix Boccace 2012.

Author Biography: Emmanuelle Pagano was born in Rodez (Aveyron) in 1969. Her novels have been translated into more than a dozen languages, and she has won multiple awards for her writing, including the EU Prize for Literature and the French Ecology Novel Prize. This is her second book published in English.