There’s always something absent that torments me.

Placed as an epigraph, Camille Claudel’s words give both the theme and the tone of this exceptionally sensitive novel, served by an unusually vibrant and modest pen. The most westerly point of Brittany, the Finistère, is its setting. There, winds sweep the moors and the sea is wild, but inside the cold stone houses, restraint dominates. Marie’s father, a worker at the Breast arsenal and amateur carpenter, has sunk into an unfathomable silence. Her mother, Louise, and her grandmother, the gentle Melie, seem to be in permanent mourning. Her older sister, Jeanne, is an innocent subject to accesses of rage. Marie, born in the mid-50s, was raised in this strange atmosphere, and tries to grow amidst everything that has been left unsaid and the portraits of the deads. Deprived of explanations, she listens to the whispering, assembles bits and pieces, senses, imagines. Years of patient investigation will be necessary to pierce the secret of her origins, and to measure the invisible, unspoken burden she has inherited.

A first novel revealing a palpitating and singular voice.
A heady tale composed like a puzzle.
A strange atmosphere and a family story burdened with what’s left unsaid, reminiscent of Philippe Grimbert’s A Secret.