A twisty, slow-burn mystery set in Paris and the Netherlands that has become a Dutch sensation.
In 1989, twenty-year-old Marie jumps at the chance to work as au pair in Paris--even though it means dropping out of her prestigious art program in the Netherlands. The city, the language, the complicated French family she works for all quickly overshadow the turmoil and pain she'd been reckoning with in school. Even as her experiences with the family in Paris begin to echo the troubles left in the Netherlands, Marie pushes on.
Years later, during the 2015 attacks in Paris, Marie is shocked to recognize her former teacher, and the main reason she fled the Netherlands, pictured in aftermath of the attacks, in the exact arrondissement where her previous employers live. The past she believed she's untethered from turns out to be be a knot still capable of constricting tightly around her. Can she face Paris--and what she ran away from to get to Paris--and finally disentangle herself from her past? Sacha Bronwasser is a writer, speaker, art historian and curator, in no particular order. She made her debut in October 2019 with the much praised All They Say is True.
David Colmer is the translator of more than 60 book-length works of Dutch-language literature and has won many prizes for his translations, including the Vondel Prize, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the NSW Premier and PEN Translation Prize for his body of work, and the Dutch Foundation for Literature oeuvre prize.
