Emmanuelle Pagano

Grains of sand, bridges, shampoo, a bike, board games, yoga, sellotape, birds, balloons, tattoos, wandering hands, tweezers, maths, fish, letterboxes, puppets, a vacuum cleaner, a ball of string and love.In this novel of yous and mes, of hims and hers, Pagano choreographs the objects, gestures, places, and persons through which love is made real.

Meetings, partings, loves and losses in rural France are dissected with compassion.The late wedding guest isnt your cousin but a drunken chancer. The driver who gives you a lift isnt going anywhere but off the road. Snow settles on your car in summer and the sequins found between the pages of a borrowed novel will make your fortune. Paganos stories weave together the mad, the mysterious and the dispossessed of a rural French community with honesty and humour. A superb, cumulative collection from a unique French voice.Why Peirene chose to publish this book:This is a spellbinding web of stories about people on the periphery. Pagano makes rural France her subject matter. She invokes the closeness of a local community and the links between the inhabitants lives. But then she reminds us how little we know of each other.Devastatingly beautiful. Le Soir, BelgiumA treasure hunt that you can follow from title to titlefine-tipped drawings of little bits of the world that attach themselves to each other imperceptibly. Xavier Houssin, Le MondePagano succeeds because of the range of her insight and the skill with which she shifts register: from wistfulness to blunt force, or from fantasy to naturalism. Chris Power, The GuardianEndlessly beautiful and poignant. Le Monde books of the year 2012With animal writing, Emmanuelle Pagano invites herself to the side of rebels and solitaries. Marine Landrot, Telerama

Adèle transporta a una docena de niños y adolescentes en un autobús escolar por el valle de Loira, entre montañas, un lago y la gente que ha vivido en el pueblo toda la vida. En uno de sus recorridos

No se podía hablar de mi vecina, ni siquiera a sus espaldas. Tampoco se podía hablar con ella. No había pedido permiso para quedarse embarazada. Además, hacía muchas otras cosas sin autorización. Creo que saltaba por encima del porton, cuando todavia no le dejaban tener su propia llave. Yo no, pero me escondia para escribir, porque no estaba muy segura de que eso estuviera permitido. Yo miraba al hijo de mi vecina, todo torcido en su cochecito, con las orbitas llenas de sol, y me preguntaba que prohibicion le impedia moverse, ver, oir, hablar, levantar una mano para limpiarse la boca. Miraba a su madre y la admiraba a escondidas. La admiraba por haber hecho eso, un crio prohibido que babeaba y encajaba todo el cielo en sus ojos.