DON’t go looking for chaos

Marion Brunet

Albin Michel, 297 pages, 2026

Why you should look at it:

√ A gripping, intimate journey into a father’s silence and Chile’s dark past.
√ A masterfully crafted novel about exile, memory, and healing
√ A poignant, unforgettable father-daughter story

***Short-listed for the 2026 Prix du Roman FNAC***

For over thirty years, Chilean exile Pablo built a peaceful life in France, raising his daughter Victoria with boundless love while burying a traumatic past marked by dictatorship, imprisonment, and exile. When Victoria, now 18-year-old, sets off for Chile alone cutting off all contact with him, Pablo is forced to return to Santiago to find her and finally confront the demons he left behind.

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Marion Brunet charts Pablo’s life across decades, mapping the tragedies that shape his journey from a destitute Patagonian childhood through the brutality of the Pinochet dictatorship to his eventual resettlement in France. Pablo goes to great length, and at profound personal cost, to keep his traumatic past entirely hidden from his wife and daughter, sharing only detached fragments of his memories with Hafed, his boxing coach and friend.

With restrained emotion, economical prose and masterfully orchestrated tension, Marion Brunet has crafted a searing novel in which the personal and the historical intertwine to explore the complex psychological aftermath of political trauma, family secrets, and the heavy burden of inherited memory.

Marion Brunet is a celebrated Young Adult and Literary Fiction author in France. Two of her awarded novels, Summer of Reckoning (Albin Michel, 2021) and Vanda (Albin Michel, 2022) have been translated into English and published by Bitter Lemon  Press.  Her YA novels have received over thirty prizes, including the 2017 UNICEF Prize for Youth Literature and, most recently, the prestigious 2025 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.