Translated by Penny Hueston
One summer’s day in 2056 in the mountains of southern France, a warning siren goes off: inside the belly of the receding glacier above the spa-centre village, a large pocket of water is about to give way—just as it did 150 years earlier. Hundreds of people died in the floods that followed.
My Sister is a novel about the ancestral fear of environmental disaster, and the narrator Lucie’s fear for her twin sister Clémence, who has returned to the village after a thirty-year absence.
The two women shelter together beneath the glacier, waiting for the worst, surviving on dwindling supplies. Day by day, Clémence becomes more controlling of Lucie, as the ultimate catastrophe looms over them.
My Sister is a spine-chilling story of sibling rivalry. Emmanuelle Salasc offers us a profound examination of the future of our relationship with nature—and of those close to us.
andMy Sister
‘At once an ecological dystopia and a domestic drama, My Sister is an impressive psychological thriller…The reader is left in awe. This is an encounter with a major writer.’
‘There is a striking purity to Salasc’s writing; brilliance is a matter of course and accompanies a lively sensibility…The beauty of this novel derives from the promise of renewal. My Sister is an edgy dystopia, blazing with hope.’
‘She might have changed her name (from Pagano to Salasc), but we recognise her work immediately: her meticulous curiosity about what connects human beings to nature…By aligning the dissection of toxic family relationships with a disturbing geo-political fable, My Sister offers fascinating food for thought.’
‘For Emmanuelle Salsac, writing is a form of resistance, a way of preventing the worst…A parallel develops between the possible flood from a glacier and the impulsiveness of the narrator’s twin sister, both of which must be prevented and contained. Of course, things are not that simple…’
