The Child

“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.