Faces on the Tip of My Tongue

Author/Guide: Emmanuelle Pagano

Why a Booktrail?

2000s: A snapshot of rural France

ISBN: 978-1908670540
Translator: Sophie Lewis, Jennifer Higgins
Genre: novella, Translated Fictioin

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What you need to know before your trail

Meetings, partings, loves and losses in rural France are dissected with compassion. The late wedding guest isn’t your cousin but a drunken chancer. The driver who gives you a lift isn’t going anywhere but off the road. Snow settles on your car in the middle of summer and the glitter found between the pages of a borrowed novel takes you into another world. Pagano’s stories weave together the mad, the mysterious and the dispossessed in rural France with honesty and humour. This is a superb cumulative collection from a unique French voice.

Travel Guide

France

Travel through rural France

Setting is a background in this novel, as it is the characters who dominate and have their voices heard across the pages:

“It was a place where there were strange stories going around, unsavoury ones, legends of foxes killing themselves, of a little girl made into fertiliser for pumpkins, all quite hard to believe and told by a mad-old [Polish] man they called the automatic tour guide, whose mouth would open as soon as you passed the door of his hut.”

Emmanuelle Pagano’s French original Un renard à mains nues (A Fox with My Bare Hands) is over 300 pages long. This is the shortened collection of short stories which the translators explain that they worked with Pagano to “make a selection for this English edition that focuses on a brings out the connections between the stories … we have privileged those that add up to fuller stories in themselves and point to fuller relationships between the characters”