Black Forest

By Valérie MréjenTranslated from the French by Katie Shireen Assef A book of mourning told through a coolly evocative series of life (and death) vignettes, from a lauded French writer, now in English for the first time; Six Feet Under meets George Perec. Publication Date: October 15, 2019 Paperback: 9781944700904eBook: 9781646050215 Description A man decides he is old enough. A woman returns early from a lovers’ retreat to a bottle of pills at home. And how should you explain the nuances of contemporary Paris to your mother, twenty-five years dead? Valérie Mréjen's Black Forest is a book of mourning that isn’t morbid or sentimental, but rather an elegant and wryly humorous brace against the void. With a paradoxically detached intimacy, Mréjen follows death’s dark and twisted path through the lives it touches, wringing out every possible meaning—or non-meaning—along the way. A writer at the height of her career who draws comparisons to Georges Perec and Nathalie Sarraute, Mréjen has cem