Description

Lili is Crying, Helene Bessette’s debut novel, explores the fraughtness and depth of the troubling relationship between Lili and her mother Charlotte. With a near-mythic quality, Bessette’s stripped-back prose evokes at once the pain of thwarted love – of desire run cold – and the promise of renewal. Lauded by critics on its initial publication in 1953 for its boundary-pushing style, unusual economy of expression, strange humour and sheer vivacity, Lili is Crying announces Bessette’s singular take on the ‘poetic novel’. This edition marks the very first translation of Bessette’s work into English, by Windham-Campbell Prize-winning author and translator Kate Briggs.

Publisher Review

‘Living literature, for me, in France today – it’s Helene Bessette.’

– Marguerite Duras ‘Lili is Crying is stunning: a choral fever-dream of a book cycling through passion and despair, loyalty and betrayal. Bessette’s cadence and lyrical concision are bewitching and necessarily airless, much like the mother-daughter relationship they chronicle. It’s also a vivid and unforgettable portrait of place – a sun-drenched landscape with world war at its fringes, and the slow fade of one era into another. Kate Briggs’s translation is a powerful channelling of Bessette’s voice: distinct, unapologetic and eerily present.’

– Daisy Lafarge, author of Lovebug ‘I’m grateful to Kate Briggs for her translation of Lili Is Crying – a tragic, comic, invigorating book with an eccentric staccato style that blurs speech and thought.’

– Kathryn Scanlan, author of Kick the Latch ‘A manic, brilliant maze of a book. Circular, cinematic, comic.’

– Sinead Gleeson, author of Hagstone ‘Lili is Crying is not straightforwardly tragic – as the title may initially trick us into believing – but darkly funny, marvellously strange, insistently performative and, somehow, truer than true.’

– Saba Sams, author of Send Nudes ‘This book is brilliant and bizarre, a Grey Gardens-esque tragicomedy, as if written by a sinister cousin of Stevie Smith.’

– Camilla Grudova, author of The Coiled Serpent ‘AT LAST, SOMETHING NEW.’

– Raymond Queneau, author of Zazie in the Metro Eimear McBride is the author of four novels: A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, The Lesser Bohemians, Strange Hotel and The City Changes Its Face. She held the inaugural Creative Fellowship at the Beckett Research Centre, University of Reading and is the recipient of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize, Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.