The Beauty of the Days

Original title: La beauté des jours

Author: Gallay, Claudie

Publication Date:

August 2017

Pages:

416

Original language and publisher

French | Actes Sud

Territories Handled

Netherlands, North America, Scandinavia

The Beauty of the Days

Original title: La beauté des jours

Author: Gallay, Claudie

  • 2 Seas Represents: Dutch, Nordic, and North American rights.
  • Rights Sold: Finland (WSOY)
  • Over 50,000 copies sold. N°4 in Livres Hebdo’s Top 20 Favorite Booksellers list
  • Selected for the Prix du roman Fnac

NOVEL

With a delicate grace and touching complicity, one soon feels close to this new Madame Bovary saved by contemporary art. Little is commonplace; exciting and stimulating. — Madame Figaro

Claudie Gallay has this extraordinary ability to find the right words and phrases that resemble the little things of our daily life and the great emotions too, the talent to be able to write what is felt. This novel is peaceful, moving, and even nostalgic at times. — Léa Touch Book

The famous writer of Déferlantes publishes a new novel, tender and bright, on the liberating force of art. — Lire

The portrait of Jeanne, a touching and sensitive woman, who slowly transforms herself thanks to certain unforeseen events in life. Also a tribute, so right and so unexpected, to the visual artist Marina Abramovic. — ​Page des libraires

A subtly provocative novel. — Avantages

With light touches – short sentences, simple words, a poetry of the whole – Claudie Gallay sketches the portrait of a sweet woman who looks in a mirror but contemplates the reflection of another. — La Croix

Claudie Gallay’s prose never gives way to clichés. She captures with short, incisive sentences the brevity and beauty of those moments that can take one a lifetime to learn how to taste. Her characters, even the secondary ones, have the weight of inevitability… This harsh and delicate unveiling of intimate power relationships is at the heart of Marina Abramovic’s work. By illustrating it so subtly, Claudie Gallay pays her a beautiful tribute. — La Vie

This atmospheric novel, written at the parents’ farm, translates into a stripped-down consideration of the power of art, the chills of adultery, the strength of friendship, of family, and transmits to the reader the part of the absolute that animates us all. — Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace

Jeanne is a woman of a calm and sunny disposition and a wife and a mother who appreciates the relaxed rhythm of a life governed by familiar routines. Fascinated since her schooldays by the performance artist Marina Abramovic, famous for exploring her life and her loves in her art, Jeanne has never reneged on her promise to herself to tempt fate and to embrace the unforeseen, and this particular summer she seems especially receptive to the unexpected. Is it because she has chanced to meet again a man with whom she was in love as a teenager? The dreamy and fanciful Jeanne now allows the currents of life to gently rock the tranquillity of her existence. Claudie Gallay has written a warm and tender novel about the liberating force of art, its power to console and illuminate, and the beauty of unpredictability.

Born in 1961, Claudie Gallay has published with Rouergue L’Office des vivants (2000), Mon amour, ma vie (2002), Les Années cerises (2004), Seule Venise (2004, Prix Folies d’encre and Prix du Salon d’Ambronay), Dans l’or du temps (2006) and Les Déferlantes (2008, Grand Prix des lectrices de Elle), and with Actes Sud L’amour est une île (2010), Une part de ciel (2013) and Détails d’Opalka (2014).

FOREIGN COVERS:

Finland (WSOY)

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