My Sister

One summer's day in 2056 in the mountains of southern France, a warning siren goes off: inside the belly of the receding glacier above the spa-centre village, a large pocket of water under pressure is about to give way—just as it did 150 years ago, when hundreds of people died in the floods of debris and water.

A novel about fear, an ancestral, collective fear about environmental disaster, and the narrator Lucie's fear about her twin sister Clemence, who has returned after a thirty-year absence.

Salasc intensifies the psychological suspense as she tracks the sisters' relationship between the past and the present. Clemence claims she is on the run, but Lucie still doesn't know whether she can trust her sister.

The two women shelter together beneath the glacier, waiting for the worst, surviving on dwindling supplies, alone above the evacuated village. Does Clemence's determination to control Lucie mean confronting the ultimate catastrophe?

My Sister is a spine-chilling slow-burn story of sibling rivalry and climate change, in which the gifted novelist Emmanuelle Salasc offers us a profound examination of the future of our relationship with nature—as well as with those close to us.

Prize-winning author Emmanuelle Salasc (formerly Pagano) was born in 1969 and lives in south-east France. She has written fifteen novels. One Day I'll Tell You Everything, published by Text, won the European Prize for Literature and has been translated into more than fifteen languages. Faces on the Tip of My Tongue was longlisted for the International Booker Prize. She regularly collaborates with artists working in other disciplines.

Penny Hueston's translations from French include novels by Emmanuelle Pagano (One Day I'll Tell You Everything), Patrick Modiano (Little Jewel), Sarah Cohen-Scali (Max) and Raphaël Jerusalmy (Evacuation). She has translated seven books by Marie Darrieussecq—All the Way, Men, Being Here: The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker, Our Life in the Forest, The Baby, Crossed Lines and Sleepless. She has been shortlisted for the JQ-Wingate Prize, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, twice for the Scott Moncrief Prize, and twice for the New South Wales Premier's Translation Prize. She was the winner of the 2020 Medal for Excellence in Translation.