A Cage in Search of a Bird

Florence Noiville

Translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan

 

5 x 8 inches, 192 pp. September 2016

ISBN : 9780857423757

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

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Laura Wilmote is a television journalist living in Paris. Her life couldn’t be better—a stimulating job, a loving boyfriend, interesting friends—until her phone rings in the middle of one night. It is C, an old school friend whom Laura recently helped find a job at the same television station: ‘My phone rang. I knew right away it was you.’

 

Thus begins the story of C’s unrelenting, obsessive, incurable love/hatred of Laura. She is convinced that Laura shares her love, but cannot—or will not—admit it. C begins to dress as Laura, to make her friends and family her own, and even succeeds in working alongside Laura on the unique programme that is Laura’s signature achievement. The obsession escalates, yet is artfully hidden. It is Laura who is perceived as the aggressor at work, Laura who appears unwell, Laura who is losing it. Even Laura’s adoring boyfriend begins to question her. Laura seeks the counsel of a psychiatrist who diagnoses C with De Clérambault Syndrome—she is convinced that Laura is in love with her. And worse, the syndrome can only end in one of two ways: the death of the patient, or that of the object of the obsession.

 

A Cage in Search of a Bird is the gripping story of two women caught in the vise of a terrible delusion. Florence Noiville brilliantly narrates this story of obsession and one woman’s attempts to escape the irrational love of another—an inescapable, never-ending love, a love that can only end badly.

 

‘What is revealed in A Cage in Search of a Bird by Noiville, is the presence—as strong as it is inexplicable—of love in hatred.  One must love greatly to make another suffer.’—Milan Kundera

 

‘Noiville’s Hitchcock-style psychological thriller will satisfy even the most ardent suspense fan. . . . Those looking for a gripping read will not be disappointed.’—Publishers Weekly.

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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