Attachment

Florence Noiville

Translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan

Forthcoming

 

5 x 8 inches, 128pp. April 2015

ISBN : 9780857422330

Rs  495.00 (HB)
$21.00 (HB)
£14.50 (HB)

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When Anna discovers a long letter that her mother Marie wrote, Marie has been dead for some time, and Anna is shocked to learn that her mother disappeared with a secret. The letter is addressed to Marie’s first great love, a much older teacher who she describes as a great dinosaur. In this gripping novel by Florence Noiville, we follow along with Anna as she tries to unravel the mystery of her deceased mother’s past. She takes her questions to her family and to her mother’s friends: Did Marie send the letter? Was it received? Who was this man, and is he still alive? In a desperate search, she tries to piece together the clues.

 

Attachment explores the obsessive relationship of love, observing both mother and daughter under its magnifying glass. Readers ultimately find Anna and Marie both seeking answers to the same question: What is there inside of us that makes us become so attached to someone we never should have approached? The novel also questions the link between love and writing, the stories that love inspires, and the way in which we construct and own the story of our lives.

 

Praise for the French edition

“With the discovery of the letters sent (or maybe not) to a lost lover, the reader finds him- or herself bewitched by the sweet melancholy of passing time through the strength and beauty of personal connections and the words used to describe them.”—La Vie

 
“This study of love—a vast and delicate subject—is told with grace. It resonates long after reading.”—Femina

Florence Noiville, author and journalist, has been staff writer for Le Monde since 1994 and editor of foreign fiction for Le Monde des Livres, the paper’s literary supplement. She has written several books for children and a biography of Nobel Prize–winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer, for which she won the 2004 Biography Award. Her first novel, La Donation (The Gift), was published in 2004. Her Literary Miniatures was published by Seagull Books in 2013.

 

 

Teresa Lavender Fagan is a freelance translator who has published over 20 translations, including J. M. G. Le Clézio's The Mexican Dream (1993) and Roland Barthes' Incidents(2010). She has also translated Meur's novel House of Shadows. 

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