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THE WORD-OF-MOUTH INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

‘Born of No Woman proves that fiction can still amaze’
Le Monde

‘A vivid, mesmerizing tale’
L’Express

‘A choral novel radiating with black light’
Elle

Nineteenth-century rural France.

Before he is called to bless the body of a woman at the nearby asylum, Father Gabriel receives a strange, troubling confession: hidden under the woman’s dress he will find the notebooks in which she confided the abuses she suffered and the twisted motivations behind them.

And so Rose’s terrible story comes to light: sold as a teenage girl to a rich man, hidden away in a old manor house deep in the woods and caught in a perverse web, manipulated by those society considers her betters.

A girl whose only escape is to capture her life – in all its devastation and hope – in the pages of her diary…

Translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud

THE HIT NOVEL RECOMMENDED BY FRENCH BOOKSELLERS:
‘The most beautiful French novel of the year’
‘Love at first sight for a book is rare. But this novel left me speechless’
‘Dive in: you’ll come out feeling utterly alive’
‘One of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read’
‘The best book I have read for a long time’
‘This story has something powerful, animal, carnal and terrible too. A punch in the gut’

Publisher Review

Here, everything is epiphanic, essential, surprising, whether it be the revelation of a secret or the painting of a detail...At once classic and phantasmagoric, Born of No Woman proves that fiction...can still amaze * Le Monde des livres * A vivid, mesmerizing tale * L'Express * Rare are those who, like Franck Bouysse, manage to write the indescribable, to touch the unspeakable, with so much subtlety and intensity. In spite of the severity and darkness of certain pages, Born of No Woman is a deeply moving and luminous book * La Libre *