The fiction of French post-colonial writer Paule Constant is remarkable in its lurid and disturbing portrayals of female characters suffering in profoundly oppressive "colonizing" circumstances. In In Search of Shelter: Subjectivity and Spaces of Loss in the Fiction of Paule Constant, author Margot Miller skillfully synthesizes Karen Horney's model of submission, aggression and withdrawal, Jean Baker Miller's concept of relational being, Julia Kristeva's idea of psychic space, and Kelly Oliver's notions on social support to analyze Constant's work. Miller's close reading also brings to light previously unnoticed mythological references in Constant's fiction which illuminate the characters' psychological realities, and examines Constant's nuanced treatment of violence through language. In Search of Shelter: Subjectivity and Spaces of Loss in the Fiction of Paule Constant reveals the myriad intersections of interpersonal and cognitive psychology, mythological and cultural awareness, literature, and lived experience, and suggests new ways of reading these and other works of fiction.

Winner of the Prix Goncourt in 1998, this book is the work of one of France's most celebrated and interesting novelists writing at the height of her powers. It is fiction that leads readers through fascinating chambers of life where autobiography is constantly reimagined. A darkly comic novel about four women aging less-than-gracefully, "Trading Secrets" takes us to an academic conference in Kansas where, in an encounter between Aurore, a French woman, and her American counterpart, Gloria, the differences between their two cultures become sharply apparent. The result is a bitingly funny portrait of painfully complex, psychologically damaged individuals, all of whom have been, in some sense, "colonized." The novel also offers an incisive picture of a French posture toward things American, from race relations to feminism to academia. As Paule Constant herself has said: "C'est un livre en miroir." The book is a mirror, both in how its characters reflect one another and in what it shows us of ourselves and our world.

When Tiffany Murano's parents, French expatriates in Africa, send her to a Catholic boarding school in France, her homeland feels nothing like home. In leaving colonial Africa, she loses the natural world, the people, and the animals she knows and loves. Behind the walls of the Convent of the Slaughterhouse Ladies, Tiffany, whom readers met in Paule Constant's award-winning first novel, " Ouregano," leads a life cut off from the world, a life of immutable and ironically secular ritual. She finds solace only in visits to her grandmother's nearby farm, which becomes a sanctuary, paradisial in its isolation. But it is only a matter of time before this magical world is threatened.
Based loosely on Constant's own experiences, "Private Property" is at once deeply moving and intellectually exacting, an exploration of identity, home, and the tenuous relationship between mothers and daughters.

The fiction of French post-colonial writer Paule Constant is remarkable in its lurid and disturbing portrayals of female characters suffering in profoundly oppressive 'colonizing' circumstances. In In Search of Shelter: Subjectivity and Spaces of Loss in the Fiction of Paule Constant, author Margot Miller skillfully synthesizes Karen Horney's model of submission, aggression and withdrawal, Jean Baker Miller's concept of relational being, Julia Kristeva's idea of psychic space, and Kelly Oliver's notions on social support to analyze Constant's work. Miller's close reading also brings to light previously unnoticed mythological references in Constant's fiction which illuminate the characters' psychological realities, and examines Constant's nuanced treatment of violence through language. In Search of Shelter: Subjectivity and Spaces of Loss in the Fiction of Paule Constant reveals the myriad intersections of interpersonal and cognitive psychology, mythological and cultural awareness, literature, and lived experience, and suggests new ways of reading these and other works of fiction.