The Old Fire
A Novel
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“Vivid and intriguing...Evokes unresolved family history with subtle heat.” —The New York Times
From National Book Award–winning Elisa Shua Dusapin, a subtle yet powerful portrayal of family, secrets, and silence set against the backdrop of a crumbling house in the French countryside—perfect for readers of Katie Kitamura and Elena Ferrante.
“A bewitching meditation on tenderness and violence, intimacy and estrangement, The Old Fire will transport you to an ancient and wild place, immersing you in its temperatures and rainfalls, its grief and grace and sound and silence. You won’t be the same when you leave it.” —Tess Gunty, National Book Award–winning author of The Rabbit Hutch
Through the window, I can see a light inside.
Agathe leaves New York and returns to her home in the French countryside, after fifteen years away.
She and her sister Véra have not seen each other in all those years, and they carry the weight of their own complicated lives. But now their father has died, and they must confront their childhood home on the outskirts of a country estate ravaged by a nearby fire before it is knocked down. They have nine days to empty it. As the pair clean and sift through a lifetime’s worth of belongings, old memories, and resentments surface.
Tender and tense, haunting and evocative, The Old Fire is Elisa Shua Dusapin’s most personal and moving novel yet. An exploration of time and memory, of family and belonging, it is also a graceful and profound look at the unsaid and the unanswered, the secrets that remain, and whether you can ever really go home again.
“A touching, mysterious novel, imbued with the beauty and strangeness of a fairy tale.” —Aysegül Savas, author of The Anthropologists
“Dusapin has a rare and ferocious gift for pinning the quick, slippery, liveness of feeling to the page: Her talent is a thrill to behold.” —Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the quietly affecting latest from Dusapin (Winter in Sokcho), two sisters reunite to clear out their family home in the French countryside. Narrator Agathe, the elder at 30, is a successful scriptwriter living with her partner, Irvin, in New York City. Vera, three years younger, remained in France, where she mysteriously stopped speaking when she was six and communicates by writing. Their father has died and the house will be demolished in nine days. As they empty the house, memories surface: of their mother leaving when Agathe was nine, of life with their father, who worked long hours, and of Agathe's responsibility for her younger sister ("We were bound together by our shared language of silence and cries"). Dusapin wonderfully evokes the complexity of the sisters' relationship via flashbacks, such as Agathe's defending of Vera from bullies and Agathe's humiliation when she was invited to a party and left stranded on the steps of a cathedral. Other local landmarks such as caves and a cheese factory form an evocative picture of the rural setting and its hold on the characters. It's a beautiful rendering of unresolved adolescence.
