Tempests and Fogs

Original title: Tempêtes et brouillards

Publication Date:

January 2023

Pages:

240

Original language and publisher

Territories Handled

Worldwide excl. French

Genre

Literary Fiction

Number of copies sold:

3,000

Awards:

  • 10 Révélations littéraires by Fnac 2023 (longlisted)

Tempests and Fogs

Original title: Tempêtes et brouillards

Synopsis

Carried by incantatory writing and intimate suspense, it signs the profession of faith of awriter. —Actualitté

An intimate and moving text. — Page des libraires

A sort of contemporary tale with which the author signs (only) a second successful novel. — La Voix du Nord

Powerful and moving. — Télé 7 jours

After a multi-prizewinning début novel, Caroline Dorka-Fenech is back with a profoundly intimate novel borne up by a deeply moving, organic writing style.  A father who converts to Islam opportunistically, a disinherited daughter who tries desperately to forgive him. Between rebellion and declaration, a text that grabs you by the scruff of the neck and doesn’t let go.

“I try to picture the particular barren land where my father wandered, a refugee in his distant realm. I am his youngest daughter, and, well before he died, he, too, disinherited me.”

“Perhaps he was unhappy. I don’t think he was insane.”

When her retired father moves to Morocco, marries a woman her age, converts to Islam and announces that he has disinherited her, Carina, the “favorite daughter,”  descends into sorrow.

Who really is that father? By disinheriting her, what buried anger is he bringing back to the surface?”

Some novels are written out of a sense of life-threatening emergency. Tempêtes et brouillards is one of them. Haunted by the figure of King Lear, intertwining raw memories, telephone conversations, musings about inheritance, daughterly love, post-colonial gestures, writing and forgiveness, this unbelievably lush and intense novel penetrates darkness and searing pain on its way towards reclaiming the self.

The incantatory writing, with poetry as a lifeline, make this novel a black diamond, imbued with humanism. Drawn in by the tale’s intimate suspense and tension, at the moment they reach the words “the end,” readers will be holding a true novelist’s credo.

Marketing Information

  • English translation available
  • A first novel, Rosa dolorosa (La Martinière, 2020), acclaimed by Amélie Nothomb (“fabulous and addictive!”)
  • Rosa dolorosa won 5 literary prizes (including the 2021 Chambery First Novel Festival Award and the Prix de la librairie Saint-Pierre, 2021) and was long-listed for the “Prix des Lecteurs du Livre de Poche” (Livre de Poche Readers’ Award 2021).
  • Powerful and rarely addressed themes: disinherited children, the post-colonial relationship and pieds-noirs returning to North Africa, Islam of convenience and more.

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