In the early 1980s, Dexter and Athena Fox are raising their two sons in Suburban Melbourne (Autralian). Despite the routine challenges of domestic life, they believe themselves to be largely happy. Until Elizabeth, Dexter’s girlfriend in college, resurfaces and introduces the couple to the city’s bohemian underground—unbound by routine and driven by desire—Athena begins to wonder if life might hold more for her, and the tenuous bonds that tie the Foxes together start to fray.

“One can not write from the center because one can not see from the center” wrote Lauren Groff in her preface to Monkey Grip, a previous novel by Helen Garner. “In all her work” Groff continues “Garner excels at taking the quotidian ingredients of life, (children, love entanglements, the domestic grind, aging, friendship), and making them crackle with newness. Her eye is relentless, her prose razor-sharp, her characters overflowing with emotion. She is unafraid of showing pettiness, darkness, anger, ugliness. More daringly, she is also a great writer of joy, including the animal joy of sex, the joy of friendship, the twisted joy of lovesickness.” We couldn’t say it any better.

Accords Suspendus by Helen Garner, translated from the English (Australia) by Jacqueline Odin, éditions Christian Bourgois
Click here to purchase this book with us.

In confined Italy, Amanda has returned to her mother, Lucia, in the rugged Apennine mountains. With the world at a standstill, Amanda sleeps during the day, lives a little at night and loses interest in her studies. It’s as if she’s being eaten away from within, and a desperate Lucia doesn’t know what to do to help her.

Then Lucia receives a gift from her father that adds to her unease: a piece of land linked to the disappearance of young girls in her youth, and abandoned ever since. She recalls the weeks leading up to the tragedy, the search and the terrible end…
Set against the dramatic backdrop of the Maiella mountains, L’Age fragile is a powerful mother and daughter story and a profound exploration of human fragility and the haunting shadows of the past.

L’Age fragile by Donatella Di Pietrantonio translated from the Italian by Laura Brignon, éditions Albin Michel
Click here to purchase this book with us.

“Il y a dans ma famille une histoire de chagrin. C’est quelque chose qui peut se transmettre. Comme l’immunité dans le lait. Comme une chanson.” (“There is a history of grief in my family. It’s something that can be passed on. Like immunity in milk. Like a song,”) warns Marianne, the narrator of Perle, the beautiful debut by Sîan Hughes, poet and bookseller in Cheshire (UK).

Marianne is only eight years old when her mother goes missing. Her childhood suddenly turns from a rural idyll with her mother – who taught her at home – to an abyss of sorrow with her little brother and grieving father. Marianne clings to fragmented memories of her mother’s love: a woollen sweater adorned with plastic beads, the smell of fresh herbs, and folk songs.

Decades later, memories of her childhood flood back to Marianne, now a mother herself. These intersect with recollections of the legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, as told in the Middle English poem Pearl. And Marianne comes to realize what may have led to her mother’s disappearance…

Perle is a stunning debut and a harrowing meditation on grief, abandonment and solace.

Perle by Sîan Hughes, translated from the by Valentine Leÿs, éditions Le Bruit du Monde.
Click here to purchase thiss book with us.

In L’Inventaire des rêves, Adichie trains her fierce eye on four Nigerian women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself.

Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, L’Inventaire des rêves pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations of the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power.

L’Inventaire des rêves by Chimamanda Ngochie Adichie, translated from the English (Nigeria) by Blandine Longre, éditions Gallimard

Click here to purchase this book with us.

Respirer à fond is an unadorned immersion in the thoughts of a woman on the brink of asphyxiation — marital, maternal, and existential. It reveals the invisible weight of domestic violence, the ambiguities of motherhood, the difficulty of preserving one’s artistic vocation when life overflows, and ends with the fragile possibility of renewal.

Vera, a woman in her forties, has at last escaped her abusive husband, leaving not only her marriage but also her home. A talented but unemployed presenter, Vera is trying to learn to breathe again in her battered daily life. Amidst legal proceedings, sleepless nights spent with her childhood (now drug addict) sweetheart, Vera teeters on the brink.

Should she flee? Should she dive back in? Or should she face up to it? Gradually, Respirer à fond weaves a fragile thread of reconstruction that is painful and uncertain yet resolutely alive.

Halász’s writing is both dry and poetic. There are no pathos or grand effects, only sustained attention to everyday gestures, micro-shocks of memory, and inner silences. Respirer à fond could have been a simple novel about separation, but it has becomes instead an accurate portrait of the slow process of finding oneself again.

Respirer à fond by Rita Halász, translated from the Hungarian by Chantal Philippe.
Click here to purchase this book with us.