A Sunday in Ville-d'Avray. This item is unavailable.A Sunday in Ville-d'Avray

In this subtly haunting novel, a married woman confesses her encounter with a mysterious man, which threatens the stilted calm of life in a Paris suburb.

Echoing the acclaimed and unsettling film Sundays and Cybèle from 1962, A Sunday in Ville-d'Avray is suffused with the same feeling of disquiet: Two sisters meet as the light is fading in a detached house in Ville-d'Avray, each filled with the memory of their childhood hopes and fears, their insatiable desire for the romantic, for wild landscapes worthy of Jane Eyre, and for a mad love, all concealed beneath the appearance of a sensible life. Claire Marie, considered by most to be a dreamy, passive sort of person, suddenly breaks from the everyday by confiding in her sister about an unlikely meeting in this seemingly peaceful provincial town. To her listener's amazement, she tells of her wanderings around the Fausses-Reposes forest, the Corot Ponds, and the suburban train stations, and the lurking dangers she encountered there.

In this arresting novel reminiscent of Simenon, Dominique Barbéris explores the great depths of the human soul, troubled like the waters of the ponds.

Dominique Barbéris is a French novelist. Her first book, La Ville, was published by Arléa in 1996. Eight further books have been published by Gallimard. Les Kangourous was adapted for film by Anne Fontaine under the title Entre ses mains. Quelque chose à cacher won the Prix des Deux Magots and the Prix de la Ville de Nantes in 2008. In 2018 her novel L'année de l'éducation sentimentale was awarded the Prix Jean-Freustié / Fondation de France. Barbéris also teaches writing workshops at the Sorbonne.

John Cullen (1942-2021) is the translator of many books from Spanish, French, German, and Italian, including Siegfried Lenz's The Turncoat, Juli Zeh's Empty Hearts, Patrick Modiano's Villa Triste, Kamel Daoud's The Meursault Investigation, and Philippe Claudel's Brodeck.