JE DORMAIS / I WAS SLEEPING – Valérie Perronet

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Author:

Valérie Perronet

Date:

Hachette Fictions
January 2025

Author:

Additional Info

I WAS SLEEPING

Rights Holder: Hachette Fictions
Original Language: French

Isabel prefers silence to lengthy conversations, even if it makes her seem aloof or even hostile. She’s prone to making sudden decisions, ones she sometimes can’t explain even to herself. So when she abruptly leaves her husband, taking her daughter and two suitcases, she doesn’t really know where she wants to go or what she plans to do with her newfound freedom.

In Poullic, Brittany, she rents a room from Violette, an elderly woman who helps her slowly rediscover the joy of living. Isabel starts working at the local library and begins an unlikely correspondence with a man serving a long sentence at the Poissy prison.

From letters to meetings in the visiting room, where they’ll finally come face to face, there is but one step to take. But it’s a decisive one. The silence between them must be broken.

Valérie Péronnet worked for Psychologies Magazine for a long time and collaborated on numerous memoirs before publishing her first novel in 2011: Jeanne et Marguerite, which was successfully adapted for the stage. She then published Un petit glaçon dans la tête in 2016 (winner of the Corrèze Readers' Prize) and La maison poussière in 2022 (winner of the J'ai Lu Readers' Club Prize). She is also the author, with Lieutenant-Colonel Marie-Laure Brunel-Dupin, of Avant que ça commence (2023) and Serrer les dents (2024), the first two books in a series telling the story of Mina Lacan, the Gendarmerie's first profiler.

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