Wind Drinkers - A Novel

Informationen zum Autor Franck Bouysse Klappentext "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"-- Leseprobe Prologue The man and the man’s shadow preceded the woman along the wooded slope. He labored to advance, leaning forward, his back crushed beneath the weight of a heavy bundle wrapped in deer hide that contained the couple’s belongings; shells hanging from his belt tinkled each time he set a foot down upon the earth. The woman carried nothing on her back, but a child in her arms. The child was not crying, and it wasn’t sleeping either. The man walked cautiously, primarily to avoid hazards, but also because he was on the lookout for any sign of tracks that might suggest they weren’t the first. They came to the summit of a ridge. The man glanced in the direction of the valley below them, then he looked at the woman, and she at her child. Wariness swelled in the man’s eyes. He wanted to continue on down the slope, and she grabbed him by the arm. Maybe she tried to dissuade him, on the pretext that something monstrous surely lay concealed in the dense tangles of vegetation, which in places revealed the dark waters of a sinuous river. Nobody knows for sure. And nobody knows whether or not he replied, or if his silent determination was enough to convince her to see what she wasn’t seeing, to convince her that a dream was being born, to open herself to a great undertaking of staying put, to suppress the silent chaos of their trek. Nobody knows, nobody remembers, because in the years that were to follow, neither he nor she would think to write of their shared fate, and it has since been lost, and they have since been forgotten, no living on in myth, no true glory. The Black Rimstone was what the place came to be called. Nobody knows who chose the name, perhaps the man, perhaps the woman. Most likely one of their descendants. For the moment, there is no need to say more. There is nothing left to be done other than allow the landscape to unfold like the blade of a knife long imprisoned in a handle etched with names and faces. This isn’t so long ago. It would suffice to wind back the clock-work mechanism of time, to have its hands come to a stop at that morning hour whose moment was fixed on the liquid face of the river, to take up the story well after the arrival of that first man and that first woman, the moment when a body, reduced to a corpse, its throat slit and washed clean of all its blood, drifted along on the waters of the river, swirled and spun, dashed against the rocks, to finally be impaled on a broken branch and worn away by the force of the turbulence. To return to the river’s edge, among the descendants of that first man and that first woman by its banks, and to imagine what came before with the help of what came after. Not one bird, not one reptile, not one mammal, not one insect, not one tree, not one blade of grass, not one stone was moved by the scene. Just one man, in the crowd, felt a dull and inexplicable pain in his belly, like a wrenching prescience of his own end, a germinating of...

Product details

• Authors: Franck Bouysse, Chris Clarke
• Publisher: Other press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 28.02.2023
• EAN: 9781635421729
• ISBN: 978-1-63542-172-9
• No. of pages: 448
• Dimensions: 133 mm x 202 mm x 28 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature