IN BROKEN PLACES

Pauline Harmange

(Fayard, 396 pages, 2021)

*** RIGHTS SOLD TO GERMANY AND ITALY ***

***TRANSLATION SAMPLE AVAILABLE HERE***

Anaïs is young, but she has already given up on herself: burdened by low self-esteem and a crippling chronic illness, she drifts through life selling kitchenware and dreading family reunions. The one redeeming factor in her life is Alex, her live-in boyfriend, who has enough confidence and ambition for two. When, in a short span of time, she loses him as well as her job, she impulsively moves to Limoges, a dull provincial town where she knows no one—the perfect place, someone once told her, to end one’s life.

Intent on using up her savings, Anaïs first treats herself to a luxury hotel room then moves into an apartment rented out by an old Italian widow, Madame Conti, who may have lost her sight but certainly not her taste for life. The warmhearted Madame Conti is not the only one who attempts to reach out to the taciturn Anaïs: Camille, her too-perfect big sister, leaves her professional and motherly duties behind to come visit Anaïs; then there is Hémon, Madame Conti’s protégé, a young teacher with old-school charm, with whom Anaïs reluctantly tiptoes into a relationship. But it is no easy task to pierce through Anaïs’ armor, as she continues to wallow in her pain, both mental and physical.

In Broken Places reverses the tropes of classic romantic comedy by opposing a somber and troubled heroine and a tender, sensitive, and patient man. In this intimate and moving novel, Harmange subtly addresses challenging topics—depression in its most overt but also subdued manifestations, the weight of societal expectations on women, and the ambiguities of sisterly ties, while managing to instill in her narrative both light and hope.

Pauline Harmange is a feminist activist and the author of I Hate Men, which sold more than twenty thousand copies in France alone, and has been translated into twenty-one languages. In Broken Places is her first novel, for which German and Italian rights were sold before publication.