• 2 Seas Represents: North American, Dutch and Nordic rights

NOVEL

Hélène returns to a small seaside resort in the Gironde to put a house up for sale that she purchased ten years earlier, thereby hoping to exorcise the ghosts from the past. Much to her surprise, she finds it being squatted in by a young Canadian photographer of Japanese heritage, Joe Naruse. An evening spent in absorbing conversation with him prompts her to rethink her plans, and she is further steered from her original course by the unexpected arrival of her beloved goddaughter Bambi, who is going through a bizarre and difficult period.

Alongside this reunion in a familiar setting, there are chance new encounters, night-time walks in the woods, a once-in-century storm, old crimes evoked by a painting and other lost voices, and the erosion of the coastline and Hélène’s certainties. She opens herself up to these new experiences and discovers the love and the freedom that she had been ardently seeking all along without realising it, laying her personal demons to rest in the process.