THE PENAL COLONY - SECOND HAND

There are no coincidences. Aurelie Bredin, a beautiful Parisian restaurateur, is sure of this truth. On a gloomy Friday in November, when Aurelie is feeling depressed after a breakup, she discovers a novel entitled 'The Smiles of Women' in a quaint bookshop on the Ile-St.-Louis. Astonishingly, her restaurant and she herself are featured in its pages. After reading the entire book in one night, Aurelie wishes more than anything to meet the author of the novel because she is convinced that, without even realising it, he has saved her life. However, her wish proves to be a difficult, almost impossible, endeavour."

Kate Barnes is fourteen years old when she first experiences the strange gifts she has inherited from her grandmother's side of the family. She has a vivid waking dream, a memory of an earlier life centuries before in the small Somerset village of Oakey Vale when she was murdered by an angry mob who believed her to be a witch. Her grandmother decides the time is right to reveal to Kate some family secrets, including the ancient cave which houses the family tomb. However, just as Kate is learning to develop her second sight, her education with her grandmother is interrupted when her father insists she return to London. He is determined that Kate forget her grandmother's teachings and get a job in order to help support their growing family. But nothing will keep Kate from her to take her grandmother's place as local wise woman and guardian of the mysterious cave . . .

When Catherine Gehrig, a museum conservator in London, falls into grief after her lover’s sudden death, her boss gives her a special project. She will bring back to “life” a nineteenth-century mechanical bird. As she begins to piece together the automaton, Catherine also uncovers the diaries of Henry Brandling, who, more than a hundred years prior, had commissioned the bird for his very ill son. Catherine finds resonance and comfort in Henry’s story, but it is the mechanical creature itself, in its uncanny imitation of life, that will link these two people across a century. Through the clockwork bird, Henry and Catherine will confront the mysteries of creation, the power of human invention, and the body’s astonishing chemistry of love and feeling.

The first encyclopedic review in English of Lucette Desvignes' literary output. The prose, theater and poetry of France's most interesting contemporary authors is presented in a deft juxtaposition of commentary and translated extracts, interspersed by numerous illustrations and photos and completed by an extremely complete bibliography.