The Beginners

Quintessential Anne Serre―this restless, prowling novel explores love as a form of greed, and confused need as one shape of bereftness

Anna has been living happily for twenty years with loving, sturdy, outgoing Guillaume when she suddenly (truly at first sight) falls in love with Thomas. Intelligent and handsome, but apparently scarred by a terrible early emotional wound, he reminds Anna of Jude the Obscure. Adrift and lovelorn, she tries unsuccessfully to fend off her attraction, torn between the two men. “How strange it is to leave someone you love for someone you love. You cross a footbridge that has no name, that’s not named in any poem. No, nowhere is a name given to this bridge, and that is why Anna found it so difficult to cross.”
      Anne Serre offers here, in her third book in English, her most direct novel to date. The Beginners is unpredictable, sensual, exhilarating, oddly moral, perverse, absurd―and unforgettable.

The author of fourteen novels and short story books, Anne Serre was born in 1960. Her work has been acclaimed here as “hypnotic, enchanting” (Publishers Weekly), “tight and fabulist” (Full Stop), and ”strange and beguiling” (Kirkus).

Mark Hutchinson was born in London in 1957 and lives in Paris. Among his many translations are René Char’s Hypnos: Notes from the French Resistance and The Inventors and Other Poems.