Underneath the Layers

Original title: Sous les strates

Author: Eve, Lou

Publication Date:

August 2023

Pages:

224

Original language and publisher

French | Les Escales

Territories Handled

Worldwide excl. French

Genre

Literary Fiction

Awards:

  • Prix de la Vocation 2023 (longlisted)
  • Prix Jeune Mousquetaire 2024 (longlisted)
  • Prix des lectrices et des lecteurs des bibliothèques de la Ville de Paris (longlisted)
  • Festival du Premier Roman et des Littératures Contemporaines

Underneath the Layers

Original title: Sous les strates

Author: Eve, Lou

Synopsis

This book is wonderful. I was captivated by this story and its characters. It is a jubilant novel where anger is saving. A pleasure to read.  — Librairie Leclerc Le Blanc-Mesnil

This is undoubtedly one of the most interesting novels to be discovered this fall.— Furet du Nord

A nice original choral novel on the search for identity.—  L’avenir

Lesbian and transracial adoptee of Vietnamese origin, Lou Eve is the author of the testimony ‘Amours en lutte’ in Nos amours radicales (2021), a collective work published by Les Insolentes. 

How to build yourself when you are a Vietnamese child in a white family? How do you find yourself when you belong to nothing? Can fragmented memories form a coherent whole? In Underneath the Layers, three stories intertwine and three voices come together to say one thing: today, Linh is exactly where she wants to be.

A feminist, choral debut novel about identity, motherhood, transracial adoption and domestic violence, Underneath the Layers is the story of a racialized, lesbian woman’s search for herself.