Novels
- Pig Tales (1997)
- My Phantom Husband (1999)
- Undercurrents (2001)
- Breathing Underwater (2001)
- A Brief Stay with the Living (2003)
- White (2005)
- Tom is Dead (2010)
- All the Way (2013)
- Men (2016)
- Our Life in the Forest (2018)
- Crossed Lines (2020)
Non fiction
- Being Here (2017)
- The Baby (2019)
Novels Book Covers
Non fiction Book Covers
Marie Darrieussecq Books Overview
Pig Tales
Pig Tales tells the story of a young woman who lands a position at Perfumes Plus, a beauty boutique/’massage’ parlor. She enjoys extraordinary success until she slowly metamorphoses into…
a pig. What happens to her then overturns all our ideas about men, women, and beasts. An overnight phenomenon in France, selling three thousand copies a day, Pig Tales is now being made into a major motion picture by celebrated director Jean Luc Godard.
My Phantom Husband
An astonishing work of fiction from France’s ‘best young novelist’ The New Yorker, the internally acclaimed author of ‘Pig Tales.’ The premise is simple: the narrator’s husband leaves to buy a loaf of bread and never returns. Like the classics By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept and Dear Diego, Marie Darrieussecq’s My Phantom Husband chronicles a woman’s poignant descent into madness brought on by the loss of a great love. Combining a poet’s exquisite metaphors with a painter’s mesmerizing visions, Darrieussecq astounds readers with her exceptional imagination and stylistic genius. Surreal yet universal in its understanding of grief, this haunting novel reminds us why the New York Times hailed this young author as ‘fascinating and original.’
Undercurrents
A mesmerizing new tour de force from the internationally acclaimed author of Pig Tales the writer The New Yorker hailed as France’s ‘best young novelist.’ Ever since Pig Tales described by Booklist as ‘Animal Farm meets The Metamorphosis’ became an immediate bestseller in France and was optioned by the great filmmaker Jean Luc Godard, Marie Darrieussecq has been an international literary superstar. With her stunning follow up novel, My Phantom Husband an immediate 1 bestseller Darrieussecq continued to earn critical acclaim. Undercurrents is her greatest triumph to date. A mother and daughter mysteriously disappear to a deserted seaside town in Spain, but the main character emerges as the sea itself, as Darrieussecq evokes the varied moods and rich palette of the ocean with poetic genius. From seemingly simple events, Darrieussecq deftly plunges the reader into a sensual, surrealistic literary experience grounded in yet worlds away from day to day reality. Called ‘truly inspired’ by Elle and ‘gripping’ by Le Monde, Undercurrents fulfills and exceeds our expectations of this talented young author.
Breathing Underwater
A young woman walks out on her life, taking only her young daughter. She drives down to the seaside and they spend the first night camping on the beach. The next day, they cross the border and stop in a small Spanish town. And there they stay. The old life of routine and immobility is transformed into one of freedom and fluidity. Mother and daughter play on the beach, go for walks, eat ice cream. They watch the ocean. And they make new contacts: with the owner of the flat, with a swimming instructor who is teaching the child and with a strangely hesitant private investigator, hired by the woman’s deserted husband…
Intensely sensual, simple yet unnerving, Breathing Underwater is Darrieussecq’s tour de force. The novel was hailed in France as ‘gripping’ Le Monde, ‘truly inspired’ Elle and ‘the good news we’ve all been waiting for’ Le Figaro.
A Brief Stay with the Living
From the ‘stunningly talented’ author of Pig Tales and Breathing Underwater comes a new novel about a family haunted by their past. An exploration of loss and guilt, A Brief Stay with the Living is the story of a mother and her three grow up daughters. Jeanne, the eldest, has moved to Argentina with her husband; Anne lives alone in Paris, but is in the throes of an unhappy affair with a married man; and Nore, the youngest, is in her first year at university but still living at home. Although not close, all four women are drawn together by an incident from their past a secret that the story only gradually reveals.
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