Yule Island | Johana Gustawsson, transl. David Warriner

An infamous manor house on a small Swedish island. A wealthy family with secrets. A string of unexplained deaths. In the first of a new series, French crime author Johana Gustawsson, who has Nordic roots, combines elements of the traditional gothic thriller with dark Scandinavian crime fiction. The result is a riveting and atmospheric jaw-dropping read.

Read the rest of this review on Crime Fiction Lover where it was originally published.

Yule Island is published by Orenda Books who provided me with an electronic review copy for review on the Crime Fiction Lover website.

Forgotten on Sunday | Valérie Perrin

Justine Neige lives in Milly, a village of about 400 people, so small you’ll need a magnifying glass to find it on a map. Yet, Justine is content with her life. By day she works at The Hydrangeas, a retirement home, as a carer and by night she goes dancing. These are her two loves: the elderly and music.

Her interest in the elderly was sparked when her French teacher took her 7th grade class to The Three Pines for an afternoon. Being raised by her grandparents may have also contributed. Justine and her cousin Jules’ parents “had the terrible idea of dying together in a car accident one Sunday morning”, caused by a tree in the road and one of their fathers driving too fast. Their grandparents lost both their sons and was left to raise their two children. Justine misses having a mother. Her grandparents did their best, but they were mostly absent. As a child, whenever her grandmother touched her, it was always with a wash glove.

“They’re always inside the house, but never in the rooms. They’re always at the table, but never on the menu.”

Since his sons died, her grandfather has stopped waiting for anything, and her grandmother has “the suicide sickness.” She was fine for a month, then she’d swallow three pill packets, stick her head in the oven, or jump from the second floor.

Hélène, a resident who shares her life story with Justine—a story Justine meticulously pens down in her blue notebook, connecting the strands of Hélène’s fragmented memories—provides Justine with the motherly affection she’s always lacked. Through Hélène’s retelling of her life Justine learns of Lucien Perrin, Hélène’s only love she temporarily lost due to the Second World War and who returned as a different man. Her story is one of sadness, tragedy, but also of hope.

These days, Hélène thinks back to a beach day she and Lucien had. Subsequently the staff refer to her as “The Beach Lady.” Also because a seagull has made itself at home on the building’s roof since her arrival. The seagull has followed Hélène throughout her life and became a symbol of hope.

“She assures him that every human being is linked to a bird. You just have to look up at the sky to see that your bird is never far away.”

The transient nature of life and the significance of taking care of your loved ones are brought to light when an unknown individual begins calling the families of residents who are never visited on Sundays to inform them that they have passed away.

Love remains elusive for Justine. Even though she occasionally sees someone who is persistently pursuing her, at 21 she doesn’t feel the need to commit to any one person. Jules says she “thinks like a novel” and that she is too naively sentimental. She dreams of love, yet when it’s within her grasp she rejects it.

Forgotten on Sunday is a heart-warming, empathetic story of love and loss. It’s tinged with sadness as it shifts between the past and present, but Perrin’s wonderfully quirky and poetic writing style makes it an absolute joy to read. It also serves as a reminder that the elderly’s stories should not be dismissed and as Justine reminds us, there are two things she’s learnt from them: 1. Make the most of life, it goes fast and 2. Never tell a secret.

Forgotten on Sunday is published by Europa Editions internationally and by Jonathan Ball in South Africa. The team at Jonathan Ball kindly gifted me with a review copy of the novel.

About the author

Valérie Perrin grew up in Burgundy and settled in Paris in 1986. Her novel Forgotten on Sunday won the Booksellers Choice Award. Her English-language debut, Fresh Water for Flowers won the Maison de la Presse Prize, the Paperback Readers Prize, and was named a 2020 ABA Indies Introduce and Indie Next List title. Fresh Water for Flowers has been translated to over thirty languages, and sold over 1 million copies worldwide. Since graduating in French from Oxford University, Hildegarde Serle has worked in London as a subeditor, mainly on The Independent. In 2011, she did the CIOL Diploma in Translation. She still lives in London, but her heart lives on the Quai aux Fleurs in Paris.

The Enigma of Room 622 | Joël Dicker

Translated by Robert Bononno — With 12 million books sold worldwide, Swiss author Joël Dicker is a global success and one of the most popular authors in the French-speaking world. His road to fame began in 2010 when he was awarded the Geneva Writers’ Prize for unpublished manuscripts, and Parisian editor Bernard de Fallois purchased the rights to publish his winning submission. A few months later, de Fallois released the book that made Dicker famous, The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, which in turn became a film. Bernard de Fallois died in 2018, and with The Enigma of Room 622 Dicker pays homage to his publisher, mentor and friend.

Continue to read this review on the Crime Fiction Lover website where it was originally published.

Vanda | Marion Brunet

Following up from her 2018 Grand Prix de Littérature prize winning novel, Summer of Reckoning, Marion Brunet brings us a claustrophobic, unsettling and gut-punching new book about a woman and her young son living on the fringes of society in Marseilles.

Read the rest of this review on the Crime Fiction Lover website where it was originally published.

Blue | Emmelie Prophète

At a mere 126 pages Blue is part lyrical stream of consciousness, part ode to the narrator’s motherland and generations of women. Their stories are told to us while she travels from Miami back to her hometown, Port-au-Prince, Haiti and finds herself waiting at the airport.

“This morning I am measuring the steps of those people, my people, their lowly paths. I am seeking their souls to console myself. I have an urgent need for reasons to dream, to continue to watch travelers, to think of where they might be going, what their lives are like. I’m alive too, with my roots painfully severed. I am strangely alive.”

Airports are the perfect breeding ground for contemplation and reflection – according to our narrator they are a distillation of the world. Thousands of people move through a confined space, their lives separated, yet for a moment intertwined. This is where scenes of sadness and happiness transpire next to each other, hope for a new future and despair for might be lost.  At the time in which Blue is set airports are also places of uncertainty and fear. Two planes have just crashed into the World Trade Centre and the world is standing on the precipice of change.

It’s both this dynamic and emotive setting and the fact that she has just returned from a funeral which leads our narrator to contemplate her past, her country and her family’s struggles. Simultaneously she can’t separate her own identity from her country’s or her family, in particular the women she grew up with.

“I have hidden myself too often beneath words and their images, I’ve only ever just brushed the surface of anything, I am nothing but a memory trying to exist, and no one would notice, if I disappeared. I tell myself that no one sees me in this airport; my fate is to be a fleeting memory.”

Being born and raised in Haiti as a woman was not associated with choice or freedom. For the narrator’s mother her marriage was one arranged by family, leaving her fragile and afraid of taking risks or having an opinion. Love was merely part of a transaction. These were women who had no heroes or models, they were considered mothers and in being mothers servitude and self-sacrifice was expected of them. Her description of her mother as she sits by her sewing machine is one filled with melancholy whilst perfectly depicting the fate of women without any choice in their own lives.

“My mother’s heart makes the same sound as her sewing machine, which I have known my whole life. I’ve seen many women sit behind that machine, which makes an ancient mechanical noise, like Maman’s heart, like the heart of all women who have been poorly loved. My mother sits down at Linda to listen to that lovely imitation of her heartbeat, when she doubts her own existence.”

Despite its understandably melancholic tone and subject matter Prophète’s love for her country and family is unmistakable. She realises that she is bearing witness to “… the slow death of my land, to its inexorable slide toward a foreign elsewhere, toward the sea, toward the abyss near and far.”

This isn’t a narrative driven story with a clearly set out, chronological timeline. Instead, the reader is taken along on a meandering of thoughts; memories and insights. Full of beautifully descriptive prose one can only imagine that Prophète’s text must have posed challenging, yet Tina Kover succeeds in delivering an impressive translation which undoubtedly will open the Haitian writer’s work to a new audience. If you find it difficult to purely enjoy a book for it’s wonderfully descriptive prose, Blue is not for you. However, if you have an hour to pause, let Prophète take you with her on a poetic and heart-breaking journey.

About the author

Born in Port-au-Prince, where she still resides, Emmelie Prophète is a poet, novelist, journalist, and director of the National Library of Haiti. Her publications include Blue (Le testament des solitudes), which earned her the Grand Prix littéraire de l’Association des écrivains de langue française (ADELF) in 2009; Le reste du temps (2010), which tells the story of her special relationship with journalist Jean Dominique, who was murdered in 2000; Impasse Dignité (2012); and Le bout du monde est une fenêtre (2015).

About the translator

Tina Kover is an American-born literary translator specializing in both classic and modern literature, including Négar Djavadi’s Disoriental, Alexandre Dumas’s Georges, and Mahir Guven’s Goncourt Prize–winning Older Brother. Her work has won the Albertine Prize and the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Fiction and has been shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, the National Book Award for Translated Literature, the PEN Translation Prize, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and the Scott Moncrieff Prize. She is also cofounder of the YouTube channel Translators Aloud, which spotlights readings by literary translators from their own work.