Colette Fellous

Translated by Sophie Lewis

First English edition published 16 September 2019

Shortlisted for 2021 NSW Translation Prize

Sidi Bou Saïd, Tunisia, June 2015: facing the sea at night, in the aftermath of a friend’s death and of the terrorist massacre on the beach of Sousse, a woman attempts to take stock. In a heart-broken adieu that is also a love letter to her native country, the memory of her late father resurfaces and, with it, the story of Tunisia’s Jewish community. Shifting focus from Tunisia to Paris to a Flaubertian village in Normandy, Colette Fellous composes a mosaic of colourful portraits, giving voice to loved ones silenced in death and those often unheard in life.

‘Colette Fellous’ beautiful book, humming and dancing with sensual intelligence, newly vivid in Sophie Lewis’s deft, delicate, agile version, takes change and translation as its very themes. It asks us to imagine leaving home, searching for a new home. That home may simply be language itself, a web of knotted meanings. However, if that web serves as a rope bridge slung between places and people, and the bridge is cut and falls, survival is put at stake. This Tilting World explores how, after such a rupture, one woman tries to re-compose the meanings of her life and thereby go on living.’ — Michèle Roberts

'A bewitching, hallucinatory elegy to home and exile, love and death, memory and loss. In precise, haunting prose, Fellous evokes the places and relationships, smells and sounds that make up this jigsaw of memories, set against the violence of contemporary events in Tunisia and France.' — Natasha Lehrer

‘At times reminiscent of Elias Canetti’s Voices of Marrakesh, this gentle meditation on loss, fragmentation and the violence of intolerance, can be as unsettling as it is moving.’ — Selma Dabbagh, author of Out of It

200 pages
paperback, 205 x 140 mm
isbn 978-1-9993318-0-1

Two or more items at full price in your basket? Add a note at check out for your free copy of Detour/Détours.

NB: Due to sales restrictions and VAT regulations, this book ships overseas, except countries of the EU, Canada and the USA. For the EU, please use alternative UK or local online retailers. This book is published in North America by Two Lines.