"Intense and bravely uncompromising. An adult study of pain, thwarted affection, and guarded privacies in a world at the edge of violent public breakdown. An impressive achievement." --DAVID MALOUF, author of Ransom: A Novel and The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World Simone and Claude live in a house with a lush garden, surrounded by a hedge that barely protects them from the growing violence and unrest in their low-income neighborhood. Simone mourns the loss of youth and possibility as Claude, a gym teacher who has been diagnosed with cancer, edges toward death. This is an unflinching portrait of a couple ravaged by illness and locked into mutual isolation--that is, until the arrival of a young boy brings hope and upsets their delicate danse macabre to devastating effect. Pascale Kramer dissects romantic love's psychic carnage while unsentimentally revealing the unique beauty born of an adult's love for a child. As does Marguerite Duras, she wields spare language like a club and plumbs emotional depths rarely reached outside of poetry. A brilliant collision of hope and despair, The Child is a tour de force. Pascale Kramer, recipient of the 2017 Swiss Grand Prize for Literature, is the author of fourteen books, including three novels published in English: The Living, The Child, and Autopsy of a Father. Born in Geneva, she has worked in Los Angeles, and now lives in Paris, where she directs a documentary film festival about children's rights.

Praised for her “exceptional ability to narrate the heartrending lives of ordinary people” (Jean-Louis Hippolyte), deliver a “riveting page-turner” (Entertainment Weekly), and master the “art of creating a diffuse discomfort” (Marie Claire), Pascale Kramer is one of the world’s finest chroniclers of psychological disturbance and the family interior. First published in France in 2016, this novel has already been named a finalist for three prizes. Autopsy of a Father was inspired by the real-life scandal of French author Richard Millet who, in 2012, made headlines for publishing an essay in praise of Anders Breivik, the right-wing extremist who killed 77 people in Norway. Set in France, the novel addresses issues of racism and anti-immigrant sentiment rampant throughout Europe by showing how the personal becomes political. Without resorting to polemics, Kramer shows how a recognized intellectual can shift toward dark and intolerant positions, and how that can tear through the fabric of a family and society at large.

How, this novel asks, can you imagine the worst when you are young and life is sunny? The answer lies in the telling of The Living, in which a young mother, with her teenage brother, takes her two small children to a deserted quarry on a hot summer afternoon. Seen through the eyes of the brother, Benoit, the drama plays out with all the power and seeming inevitability of classical tragedy, made all the more intense by the blistering heat of the day. On that blazing hot summer day Benoit, to entertain his nephews, seats them in a gondola and sends them down a cableway to the pylon on the other side of the river. The harrowing story of what follows is narrated in Pascale Kramer's artfully simple yet transparent prose, evoking the deep reservoirs of feeling that family members cannot voice, perhaps even to themselves. The Living is filled with the vitality of summer. At the same time, it reveals suffering at its most pure and most volatile as the affected people wonder, in the wake of tragedy, whether they should subsist with the living or with the dead. Pascale Kramer's Les vivants received excellent reviews in the French and Francophone press and won the Prix Lipp, Switzerland's most prestigious literary prize. Kramer is the Swiss author of several other books in French, including Manu and Onze ans plus tard. Tamsin Black has translated many books, including Marie NDiaye's Rosie Carpe, available in a Bison Books edition.