ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER

Rights sold to: Israel (Miskal), Italy (Longanesi), Poland (Cyklady), Serbia (Arhipelag), USA (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, world rights)

In the year 2004, the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer would have turned 100. He was born in Poland in 1904 and he died in Miami in 1991. In 1978 he received the Nobel Prize. This biography - the first to be published in France - recounts the life of this immense and prolific writer. From his Polish childhood to his exile in America, the road took many turns. Florence Noiville retraces that road step by step and thus reveals a proud and solemn personality, a fact that contradicts those who continue to recognise in Singer only the charming story-teller, the mischievous fable-writer of the Jewish soul. On the contrary: to unravel the traces of his existence is to discover a champion of physical and metaphysical distress, one of the most modern virtuosos of anguish, inhibition and fiasco. Irritating, endearing, fascinating: this Singer is miles away from the usual stereotypes. And Florence Noiville's biography - which explores the writer as much as the man - is just one reading of his life.The book's structure alternates between a chronological account of Marie-Anne's movements and the author's letters to her mother, now 84, informing her of his research and revealing her daughter's darker side.



Florence Noiville is a journalist at Le Monde. Attachment is her second novel after La Donation which was published in 2007. She is also the author of Isaac B. Singer (winner of the 2003 prix du récit biographique and translated into 5 languages) and J'ai fait HEC et je m'en excuse (2009), as well as several works for young adults.