January 15, 2018
Delury’s melancholy debut takes place between 1890 and 2009 and revolves around a manor house and servant’s cottage in Benneville, a fictional French village. An American au pair takes care of young Élodie as Olga, the girl’s smothering mother and a concentration camp survivor, packs up the family to move to the United States; only later does the au pair learn of the child’s leukemia. During WWII, after Olga had been sent to the camp, a woman looted the manor house
to feed her daughter, Charlotte, more than bread and butter. Years later, Charlotte’s husband suffers from cancer treatments and can keep down nothing but toast and tea. Another elderly woman’s husband has a debilitating stroke that transforms him into an unrecognizable version of himself. Careful readers will note the connective tissue between Olga and Charlotte, but occasionally the author struggles in creating a link. The prose is tight and each stories are told well; this is a satisfying examination of the various and irrevocable ways lives intersect. Agent: Samantha Shea, Georges Borchardt, Inc.
February 15, 2018
In this sophisticated and impressive first novel, the author deftly ties together seemingly unrelated stories, ranging back and forth in time, while bringing each of her characters to vivid life. In the first of her interconnected stories, a young American woman comes to work as an au pair for a family living on a French country estate on the Seine in 1992. This is not as glamorous as it sounds. The once grand house on the estate has long been in disrepair, and the local town, Benneville, is an unromantic industrial city with factories bordering the river. Other vignettes portray the various people who live in or visit the estate over the course of a century or so. While there is not exactly a curse on the house, each family that inhabits it is unhappy in its own way. In 1890, an aging courtesan who had married the son of the house when she was younger throws herself off the balcony. The war years of the 1940s are particularly grim, but each era presents its own challenges. VERDICT This beautifully written novel can be enjoyed both for its literary merits and for the intriguing stories of its characters.--Leslie Patterson, Rehoboth, MA
Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
February 1, 2018
Delury's satisfying puzzle of a debut novel hops back and forth in time through the lives, over the past century, of the residents of a manor and its adjoining cottage near what has become by modern day a seedy suburb of Paris. Each chapter of the novel could be a full-fledged short story on its own; together, they reveal a pattern that only completes itself with the final one. Several of the secrets of the past, including a mysterious death in a pond and the suicide of a courtesan, are hinted at in the first chapter, in which a young American nannies the daughter of a professor and his wife. Minor characters in one story become major players in another, and the reader often learns with a pleased shock what has happened in the life of a character who seemed to have been forgotten. Without overdoing it, Delury imparts a fairy-tale feel to the forest surrounding the central buildings and the dark pond at their outskirts.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)
Starred review from January 15, 2018
In an assured debut, a delicate fretwork of lives, relationships, and secrets is built up over the course of a century--and linked by a manor in an ugly French village.Opening in 1992 with Brigitte, an American hired to work as an au pair in Benneville, a community outside Paris, this unusual novel in stories introduces a place--the Leger country estate--which will act as the connective tissue to 10 overlapping narratives. This "bourgeois manoir with a facade of buttery limestone that stretched three stories into slate turrets and gables" has weathered architectural looting, wars, suicide, and sacrifice and has been home to entrepreneurs and deserters as well as the people who worked for them. Brigitte finds herself attracted to current owner Hugo, a damaged academic, but this is just one single--if significant--moment in a woman's search for a life trajectory that fits. An intriguing mix of relationships--flawed men, unsettled women, struggling parents and partners--follows, arranged in nonchronological order, with characters recurring, often moving from a glancing reference to center stage. In "A Place in the Country" we meet the Havre family, whose generations, and scars, crop up in several chapters. Paterfamilias Henri, the village schoolmaster and a hero of the World War II Resistance, is as cold and bullying to his grandsons, Alexis and Emmanuel, as he was to his schizophrenic son, Guy. Alexis, whose adult choices are shaped by a childhood encounter with his uncle Guy, reappears in "Half Life," and Emmanuel's daughter, Adele, appears in both "Tintin in the Antilles," an insightful snapshot of aging, and the weaker "Ants." While the author affectingly composes her characters' individual psychologies in slow dabs of detail, the manor's physicality supplies permanence, its balcony a witness to two of the darkest episodes, and the surrounding forest a penumbra of mystery and continuity.Strikingly deft and nuanced; a writer to watch.
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