An unsettling and raw monologue, even more so because of the cool control de Vigan sustains ... The only way to read this book is to stop, put it down, gasp, absorb the horrors and then read on. Shortlisted for eight major literary awards in France, it won two, and it is easy to see why. It is an overpowering work, almost impossible to assess because of the extreme behaviour described ... [will] leave a reader shaken and affected. How many books can do that? * Eileen Battersby, Irish Times *
Delphine de Vigan is a sensation * Observer *
Thrilling, tender ... A genuinely shocking, incandescent read * Janice Galloway, Scotland on Sunday *
Compassionate and powerful, as well as painful and shocking ... The luminous accuracy of the prose reminds me of Colette ... the Poirier family - parents and children - appear in a kind of Renoir sunlight, overflowing with life and vibrant personalities, almost enough to conceal the lurking darkness * Ursula Le Guin, Guardian *
Absolutely stunning. This remarkable book is not a memoir, a biography, an analysis or a novel: it is all these and more. It is about the struggle to weave sense out of mutinous threads, how silence breeds crisis, how we are made and unmade. Gauging the extent of the mystery that was her mother, de Vigan strips the psychodrama of family ties - the basis of every human life - to the bone * Janice Galloway *
De Vigan never spares her own self-absorption in her repellently irresistible investigation of a life that amounted to symphonic self-destruction yet achieved a bizarre and compelling heroism * Eileen Battersby, Irish Times Books of the Year *