For his debut novel La fille aux plumes de poussière in 2022, Nicolas Garma-Berman was named by Le Figaro littéraire as one of 12 best debut novelists of la rentrée and was voted by booksellers as one of their 12 favorite debut novelists of la rentrée …

Two brothers, Roy and Ness, left Scotland as boys with their father who needed a fresh start. They settled in Geneva and all we know is that their mother “would never be coming back”. The loss of their mother has weighed on them both tremendously over the years but in very different ways and for different reasons.

Now adults, Roy has his own family while Ness is the one who looks more closely after their senile father who’s living in a home. When Roy’s daughter Emily dies tragically, his wife Selkie needs space. She goes to their remote cabin in the mountains but after a few weeks she disappears.

Emily’s death and Selkie’s disappearance haunt Roy and Ness just like the loss of their mother when they were children. The voices of the two brothers alternate to give us two different versions of the same events, those from the past and those in the present.

Nicolas Garma-Berman was born in 1981. He grew up in Paris, and lived in Italy and Switzerland before settling in Marseille. This is his second novel following his charming debut La fille aux plumes de poussière published in German by Atlantik (Hoffmann und Campe).