A novel that reveals the power of Christophe Bigot’s writing: about a little-known episode in the life of Marguerite Yourcenar, the first woman elected to the Académie Française, internationally renowned 20th-century writer, and… a woman in love. The “true novel” of a transgressive and impossible passion in the last years of an iconoclastic woman’s life. Captivating and stunningly well-written: a rare gem that’s already being considered for several literary awards.

In early 1980, Marguerite Yourcenar becomes the first woman elected to the Académie Française. All eyes are on this reclusive writer, who has suddenly become a symbol. But what does anyone actually know about her? That she lives a quiet life on an island off the coast of Maine. And that she has just lost her companion of over four decades, Grace Frick, who had translated her Memoirs of Hadrien into English. Almost 77 years old, Yourcenar doesn’t seem to have much left to look forward to.

And yet, just as France’s literary institution is threatening to turn her into an icon, Yourcenar is going through an almost unimaginable existential upheaval. A few months earlier, she met an American photographer, Jerry Wilson, a homosexual man, forty-six years her junior. Overwhelmed by his beauty, that reminds her of an impossible love from her youth, and pleased to realize that she has several things in common with Wilson, who is passionate about both ornithology and African-American music, Marguerite hires him to be her secretary, chauffeur, and soon, the organizer of journeys to the far corners of the world.

So begins a love story that is as unlikely as it is dangerous, as destructive as it was fertile for literature. What motivates that cheerful but inwardly tortured young man? And what does the future hold for a relationship whose intensity worries the woman of letters’ entourage?

Ranging from America’s megalopolises and wildlife preserves to classical European cities and monuments via Egypt, Japan, Kenya and India, Un Autre m’attend ailleurs is the real-life novel of the last years of the life of one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.