Seven Houses in France

Description

"Longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2012 - a dark tale of human ambition by the European master A.S. Byatt called 'A brilliantly inventive writer'." "The year is 1903, and the garrison of Yangambi on the banks of the River Congo is under the command of Captain Lalande Biran. The captain is also a poet whose ambition is to amass a fortune and return to the literary cafes of Paris. His glamorous wife Christine has a further ambition- to own seven houses in France, a house for every year he has been abroad. At Lalande Biran s side are the ex-legionnaire van Thiegel, a brutal womaniser whose mind is perennially split in two, and the servile, treacherous Donatien who dreams of running a brothel. The officers spend their days guarding enslaved rubber-tappers and kidnapping young girls from the jungle and are constantly overlooked by chattering mandrills and drenched in the heat of the most remote location in the world; at their hands the jungle is transformed into a wild circus of human ambition and absurdity. But everything changes with the arrival of a new officer and brilliant marksman- the enigmatic Chrysostome Li ge. An outstanding new novel from the critically acclaimed and prizewinning author Bernardo Atxaga, Seven Houses in France is a vivid tale which reveals the darkest sides of human desire."

Bernardo Atxaga was born in Gipuzkoa in Spain in 1951 and lives in the Basque Country, writing in Basque and Spanish. He is a prizewinning novelist and poet, whose books, including Obabakoak and The Accordionist's Son, have won critical acclaim in Spain and abroad. His works have been translated into twenty-two languages. Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator from Spanish and Portugese for over twenty years, translating such writers as Jose Saramago, Eca de Queiroz, Luis Fernando Verissimo and Fernando Pessoa. Her work has brought her a number of prizes, the most recent of which was the 2010 Premio Valle-Inclan for Javier Marias' Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell.

A dark comedy about the vanity of human desires which deftly balances compassion and cynicism * Financial Times * Bizarrely funny and beautifully crafted * Times Literary Supplement * Undeniably compelling * Daily Mail * A brilliantly inventive writer...He understands the nature of storytelling and is at once terribly moving and wildly funny -- A. S. Byatt Seven Houses in France is an enjoyable, somewhat frightening novel by one of Europe's best novelists... Atxaga is still the master of a complex story, told with deceptive simplicity -- Michael Eaude * Independent *