Wind Drinkers

Description

A thrilling mix of French noir and American Western, this novel charts a family’s struggle for freedom and justice in a hostile mountain community. In Gour Noir, an isolated valley cut off from the rest of the world, there live four siblings. Three brothers and one sister, who are united by an unfailing bond: Marc, who constantly reads in secret, in defiance of his father’s wishes; Matthieu, who can hear trees thinking; Mabel, a wondrously savage and graceful beauty; and Luc, the tragic child, the idiot, undoubtedly the wisest of them all, who can speak to frogs, deer, and birds, and dreams of one day becoming one of them. Like their father and grandfather before them, they all work for Joyce the Tyrant, the adventurer, the cold-blooded beast of the Quarries and the Dam.
    Winner of the Prix Jean Giono, Wind Drinkers is a masterful, parable-like novel about the power of nature and the promise of rebellion.
  Praise for Born of No Woman:
 
“This book feels like the Marquis de Sade’s Justine if Justine had written it…show[ing] the author’s keen observational skills when it comes to class and gender.” —CrimeReads, Best International Crime Fiction of the Month
 
“Undoubtedly effective…There are plenty of narrative surprises as Rose’s father seeks to recover her, and she falls in love with the mysterious Edmond.” —The Guardian, The Best New Fiction in Translation Franck Bouysse was born in France in 1965. He began his writing career in 2007 after working as a biology teacher. His previous novel, Born of No Woman (Other Press, 2021), has won numerous literary prizes in France, including the Elle Readers’ Grand Prize, the Booksellers’ Prize, and the Prix Babelio.
 
Chris Clarke has translated work by Raymond Queneau, Pierre Mac Orlan, Éric Chevillard, and Ryad Girod, among others. He was awarded the French-American Foundation Translation Prize for fiction in 2019 for his translation of Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives. Two years earlier he was a finalist for the same prize for his translation of Patrick Modiano’s In the Café of Lost Youth. US

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