A bizarre tale encompassing feminism, politics and social hypocrisy. A stunning young woman employed in the sex industry enjoys extraordinary success at bringing home the bacon (in part due to her increasingly rosy and irresistible backside) until she slowly metamorphoses into a pig.

Pig Tales

Literature & Fiction

Marie Darrieussecq

Contemporary

Faber Paperbacks

A young woman walks out on her life, taking only her young daughter. They stop at a small French town where they make contacts, with the owner of a flat, with a swimming instructor who is teaching the child, and with a strangely hesitant private investigator, hired by the woman's deserted husband.

Breathing Underwater

Faber&Faber

From the 'stunningly talented' author of Pig Tales and Breathing Underwater comes a new novel about a family haunted by their past. An exploration of loss and guilt, A Brief Stay with the Living is the story of a mother and her three grow-up daughters. Jeanne, the eldest, has moved to Argentina with her husband; Anne lives alone in Paris, but is in the throes of an unhappy affair with a married man; and Nore, the youngest, is in her first year at university but still living at home. Although not close, all four women are drawn together by an incident from their past - a secret that the story only gradually reveals.

A Brief Stay With the Living

An exploration of loss and guilt, A Brief Stay with the Living is the story of a mother and her three grown-up daughters. Jeanne, the eldest, has moved to Argentina with her husband; Anne lives alone in Paris, but is in the throes of an unhappy affair with a married man; and Nore, the youngest, is in her first year at university but still living at home. Although not close, all four women are drawn together by an incident from their past - a secret that the story only gradually reveals.

It is 2015. Edmee and Pete are engineers on a remote research station in Antarctica, Project White. Pete has come to find peace among the practical rituals of life on the station. Edmee, the only woman on the base, works to secure communication with the outside world. Both are running from tragic events at home, and yet even as they try to escape the past, they are under scrutiny from the spirits haunting the station. These ghostly voices draw the reader ever more tightly into the story. In this setting of magnificent desolation, just fifteen kilometres from the South Pole, a love affair begins to flourish - until there is a catastrophic power failure at the base...

White

FABER

What is it like to live with chronic insomnia? For Marie Darrieussecq, not sleeping began after the birth of her first child and continues more than twenty years later. She wonders if it is connected to her hypervigilance, to her fear of her children dying. Once they leave home, will she finally be able to sleep again? Or, she wonders, will writing this book help her to sleep again?\nIn Sleepless, she recounts her own experiences alongside those of fellow insomniacs, mostly writers - 'as if writing were not sleeping' - Ovid, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, Franz Kafka, Georges Perec and others (some of whom claim a connection between insomnia and creativity). With her inimitable humour, she describes her dealings with a somnologist and her attempts to find a remedy - trying sleeping pills, cannabis, alcohol, bedtime rituals, acupuncture, yoga, hypnosis, psychoanalysis, a gravity blanket and a range of sleep-aid devices.\nDarrieussecq considers bedrooms, beds, clinophilia ('the tendency to remain in a prone position without sleeping for prolonged periods of time'), her need to be alone in bed, those without beds, the homeless, refugees, trauma and capitalism's role in sleeplessness, our constant wakefulness online, the forest as a hypnogogic zone, and how our relationship with animals is connected to our sleep, or lack of it.\nSleep or no sleep: it matters to all of us. Sleepless will awaken you to the otherness of our world. Of erased presences, ghosts, endangered species. Insomnia feeds off this bewildering feeling: there is something else.

Sleepless

Fitzcarraldo Editions

'As a chronicle of the humiliations and occasional joys of loving someone whose own feelings are more ambiguous...it feels queasily accurate...A sometimes biting, often sharply observed take on a relationship one would surely rather read about than be part of.'Kirkus'[Readers will] find themselves enchanted by Darrieussecq’s silken, dreamy prose and this sly exploration of female desire and interracial couplings.'Booklist'There are few writers who may have changed my perception of the world, but Darrieussecq is one of them.'Times'Anyone who has experienced heartbreak will relate but should beware because this is a moody, powerful book.'The AgeSolange is thirty-something, a mediocre actress, and not a great mother. In Hollywood she falls for a charismatic actor, Kouhouesso, who wants to direct a movie of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darknessin Africa.Solange follows her man to Africa, determined to play a main role in both his film and his affections. But nothing goes to plan in this witty examination of romance, movie-making and clichés about race relations. After all, there's no guarantee you'll be loved by the one you love.

Text Publishing Company

The Baby is a mother's project and a writer's project - how to reconcile these two demanding roles? What is a baby? And why are there so few of them in literature? Through notes taken in the months after her first child was born, Darrieussecq, in her characteristically ingenious style, makes observations that will bring smiles and grimaces of recognition, and raise important questions. Along with the banal drudgery of childcare, there is the euphoria, the obsession, the terror and the visceral focus on the body. Arguing with 'Saint de Beauvoir', Darrieussecq examines how women as mothers are targeted from all angles. How, she asks, can a woman be more and other than a mother?

The Baby

Penny Hueston

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Our Life In The Forest

Literary

Text Publishing

Divided by theme into chapters, this light-hearted and nostalgic romp through 20th-century Paris creates a beautiful history of the world’s most romantic city and its exceptional women. This collection of one hundred and thirty duotone photographs captures the essence of the Parisian femme fatale. All of the great French photographers from the late 1930s through the 1960s are featured, including Robert Doisneau, Brassaï, Willy Ronis, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Edouard Boubat, Jean-Philippe Charbonnier, Sabine Weiss, and many more. The photographs reveal Parisian women and all of their glorious facets: from the love-struck waif strolling along the banks of the Seine to the belles of the neighborhood balls flushed from their raucous dance moves, from no-nonsense career girls to flirty neighbors. Chanel-clad locals and runway models alike showcase the glamour of the fashion and haute-couture world with inimitable style. One chapter pays homage to the courageous women who battled for justice in World War II, the Resistance, the Liberation, and the revolts of May 1968, including role models such as philosopher and writer Simone de Beauvoir and journalist and playwright Marguerite Dumas. The Parisiennes featured here go to work, ride bikes, pose seductively, smile coyly, and are all devastatingly irresistible.

Parisiennes: A Celebration of French Women

Arts & Photography

Carole Bouquet

Madeleine Chapsal

Catherine Millet

Mireille Guiliano

Photography & Video

Flammarion

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Marie Darrieussecq. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Marie Darrieussecq

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Marie Darrieussecq. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Pig Tales

Breathing Underwater

A Brief Stay With the Living

A Brief Stay With the Living

White

Sleepless

Men

The Baby

Our Life In The Forest

Parisiennes: A Celebration of French Women