Villa Amalia

Musician Ann Hidden suspects her partner, Thomas, isn’t telling her everything. So one dark night, she secretly follows him to an unfamiliar house in the Paris suburbs, where he disappears inside with an unknown woman. But before she can even begin to process what looks like a betrayal, she gets another surprise—an old schoolmate, Georges Roehlinger, appears, berating her for spying the from the bushes.

​With Georges’s help, Ann takes radical action: while Thomas is away, she resolves to secretly sell their shared house and get rid of all the physical manifestations of their sixteen years together. Thomas returns to find her gone, the locks changed, and his few possessions packed up and sent to his office. Ann, meanwhile, has fled the country and started a new, hidden life. But our past is never that easy to escape, and Ann’s secrets eventually seek her out.

Pascal Quignard is the author of over sixty titles and is widely regarded as one of the foremost literary French writers today. In 2002, he won France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt for The Roving Shadows.

Chris Turner is a translator and writer living in Birmingham, UK. He has translated numerous books from French and German, including, for Seagull Books, titles by Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, André Gorz, Yves Bonnefoy, and Pascal Quignard, among others.