Les Fugitives

Banyuls-sur-Mer, French Catalonia: one hot summer in the 1970s, the lives of three generations of women converge in the long tropical garden hidden behind the Villa Wintrebert, named after the biologist who lived there with his wife. As in her debut After Nora (2024), Penelope Curtis deftly weaves fact and fiction in this moving story of childhood and of adult complicity. Harmony beween la belle Eugénie and the young Monique is disrupted when a well-intentioned commission to the renowned local sculptor, Aristide Maillol, shines a light on the fundamental fragility of the women’s relationship, on which the villa and its garden had depended. Decades later, Monique invites Eva and her two little girls into the villa, where traces of the past imprint themselves on the present.

To satisfy his father's request that he rescue his drifting cousin, Emil - a young Creole from a wealthy background - sets aside his medical studies to move in with his working-class relatives in the unfamiliar city of Stadmutter - the mother city. Among his indifferent kin Emil is first disquieted by days of aimlessness and then diverted by his sexual and intellectual encounters with Bolling, a rich, Haitian-German autodidact with preternatural charisma. Emil begins an ambiguous relationship with Tamsin, a graduate student obsessed with Sigmund Freud's theories and with her place in a society marked by shifting cultural hierarchies.. Beneath its veneer of indolence, Stadmutter seethes. Through his relationships with Bolling and Tamsin, Emil is pulled into the orbit of Braeem Shaka - the leader of a Creole movement that is threatening the country's fragile racial progress with its demands for reparations - and ever further from the possibility of a return to his earlier life as a promising neurosurgeon.

A slim, emotionally and thematically rich book of poetry, a grammar of the world is Jeanne Benameur''s second book published in English by Les Fugitives, offering a more personal look into the author''s own history and writing practice. For Benameur, the Egyptian goddess Isis is a sister who advances with her along the seashore. Like her, poetry responds to life''s call where the blue of the sky mingles with the blue of the sea. She is unity rediscovered. Drawing on subjects as diverse as the author''s childhood traumatic flight from the Algerian War of Independence in the late 1950s, the modern migrant crisis, the transformative power of writing and the long history of the Mediterranean, a grammar of the world is brought into harmony by the central mythological figure, who personifies a careful reknitting of the world and repairing of ancient wounds through the act of writing.

What is a writer''s life, and above all, what is left of it? This book is not a biography, but a quest; an expedition tracking what remains of the author of Remembrance of Things Past. What was it like to be in his remarkable presence? What was it like to be inside his skin-especially during his final years of intense reclusive absorption in the writing of his great book? Haunted places and abandoned sets, rare photographs, tinpot relics, half-erased fingerprints, flashes of light, piles of little memories serve as talismans to materialise the eponymous writer''s body and spirit in short, vivid chapters that resemble prose poems. Rich in detail, wry humour and quirky erudition, Zombie Proust brings back to life the invisible being, recalling his image as one summons a ghost.

Ari, Eleni and Hesper meet one summer at Golden Apples Farm in rural California, where the charismatic Lee, an apple farmer and cook, runs an alternative therapy programme for young women suffering from eating disorders. A year later, they reunite to testify at his trial. Their individual and collective stories build into a multifaceted picture of trauma and survival in this psychological thriller infused with magic realism. In sensuous, hypnotic prose, Wilder captures the magnetic pull of forbidden fruit.