They Say Sarah
A Novel
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Named a Best Book of the Year by PopMatters
A literary sensation in France, this poetic, thrilling debut charts the all-consuming passion between two women and the ruin it leaves in its wake.
A thirty-something teacher drifts through her life in Paris, raising a daughter on her own, lonely in spite of a new boyfriend. And then one night at a friend's tepid New Year's Eve party, Sarah enters the scene like a tornado—a talented young violinist, she is loud, vivacious, appealingly unkempt in a world where everyone seems preoccupied with being “just so.” Thus begins an intense relationship, tender and violent, that will upend both women's lives.
In gorgeous, evocative prose, Pauline Delabroy-Allard perfectly captures the pull of a desire so strong that it blinds us to everything else.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Delabroy-Allard's debut is a whirlwind jaunt through two women's fast-moving love affair. The unnamed narrator, a single mother recently separated from her partner, meets Sarah at a friend's party in Paris, and the action unspools quickly through a blitz of sex, travel, and emotional turmoil, cascading to a point of no return: Sarah's simultaneous falling out of love with the narrator and Sarah's diagnosis of advanced breast cancer sends the narrator reeling. The prose's short, noirish lines ("The Metro speeds through the darkness. I catch my breath. I swallow the taste of iron, of blood in my mouth") barrel forward with relentless momentum until the narrator ends up in Italy, bouncing around friends' apartments. Here, her thoughts stretch into longer and less immediate digressions, as Delabroy-Allard spins up a sudden mystery that haunts the novel's final moments. The narrator's obsessing on the torrid effects of a passion abruptly ended ("My fingers still smell like her snatch. I sniff them like a lost soul") creates a lean alternative to the amplified interrelational tension found in her contemporaries Ottessa Moshfegh and Guadalupe Nettal, with thrilling, if less heady, results. This slim tale will interest fans of French pulp legend Francis Carco.
