The Daughter of No One

Original title: La Fille de personne

Publication Date:

March 2020

Pages:

208

Original language and publisher

French | Actes Sud

Territories Handled

Netherlands, North America, Scandinavia

Genre

Literary Fiction

The Daughter of No One

Original title: La Fille de personne

Synopsis

A quest for origins and the origin of creation coalesce in the life of Luce Notte, a Berlin student who goes in search of her ghost-like father.

Luce arrives in Prague in 1912 to take up a post as an au pair at the Kafkas. There she gets to know Franz, then a young doctor of law in love with literature who is languishing miserably in an insurance company. Many years later in 1951, now in Paris where she runs her own bookshop, she meets the lonely Sadegh Hedayat, an Iranian writer rejected by his family and in exile due to his books being censored in his own country.

Two writers with strong elective affinities, both oppressed by the temptation of destroying their works and committing suicide. After she becomes the fortunate heir of two of their unpublished works, Luce comes to embody a reader’s power to bring books to life. Her giddiness before this spectral aesthetic is also that of the dark abyss that drives every writer.

Marketing Information

  • Longlisted for the Prix André Malraux