the water lily ***SOLD***

Alexandrine Descotes

Le bruit du monde, 208 pages, 2026

The Water Lily opens, in the spring of 1959, in the maternity ward of a hospital in Lyon. Colette has just given birth to her second child, a boy. But the midwife does not smile. The baby is taken away before she can hold him. The doctor finally comes to explain that the child has a rare malformation of the bladder, which has formed outside his body rather than within. His recommendation is to surrender the child to the state.

What follows is the story of an extraordinary couple — Colette, steely and clear-eyed, and Gérard, passionate and melancholic — and the battle they wage, quietly and without complaint, to give their son Jean-Luc the life the medical establishment told them he would never have. For three years they exhaust every option in France, writing to specialists, traveling to consultations, refusing every inadequate solution offered to them. Then, in November 1961, a name surfaces: Dr John Lattimer, a surgeon at Columbia University in New York. A telegram is sent. The reply comes back within days: Surgery should be possible. Bring him urgently. The sum required is far beyond their means. Gérard takes a second job, then a third. A loan is begged from a relative. February 1962 — at a time when few French households even have a telephone, when women cannot open a bank account without their husband's permission — Colette boards a Boeing 707 with her three-year-old son and crosses the Atlantic alone.

Alexandrine Descotes tells this story from the inside: she is Colette's granddaughter, and Jean-Luc is her father. Le Nénuphar moves between two timelines and two voices — Colette's story, rendered in vivid, novelistic detail, and Alexandrine's own, as she sits across from her grandparents at the kitchen table, recorder running, piecing together a history her family has kept hidden for over six decades; the Distilbène (DES) prescribed during the pregnancy, and the silence erected around Jean-Luc's condition to protect him from pity.

The Water Lily is a novel about shame and courage, about the medicine of an era that treated women's bodies with casual brutality and the intergenerational consequences of a medical scandal. It is a book about the peculiar alchemy of autofiction — the negotiation between truth and narrative, between loyalty and art. And it is, above all, a love story: between a husband and wife whose letters across the Atlantic burn with devotion, between a grandmother and granddaughter bound by the shared conviction that some stories must not be lost.

Alexandrine Descotes is a French author based in Paris. She spent time in New York, a city she continues to visit regularly for her professional work. The Water Lily is her debut novel.