Three by Valérie Perrin

About the book: Three (2022) is a compulsive story about the powers and fleetingness of friendship, love and life. 

1986: Adrien, Etienne and Nina are 10 years old when they meet at school and become inseparable. They promise each other they will one day leave their provincial backwater, move to Paris, and never part.

2017: A car is pulled up from the bottom of the lake, a body inside. Virginie, a local journalist with an enigmatic past, follows the case. Step by step she reveals the extraordinary bonds that unite the three childhood friends. How is the car wreck connected to their story? Why did their friendship fall apart?

Valérie Perrin has an unerring gift for delving deep into life’s depths. Following the thread of a sequence of heart-wrenching, inescapable events over the span of three decades, she draws the reader into a compelling story of love and loss, hope and grief, and of the distance that comes with the passing of time.

Three (2022) is a masterly crafted story full of suspense and unexpected plot twists. 

Three is translated from the French by Hildegarde Serle.

About the author: Valérie Perrin was born in 1967 in Remiremont, in the Vosges Mountains, France. She grew up in Burgundy and settled in Paris in 1986. Perrin is a photographer and screenwriter who works with Claude Lelouch. Her first novel, Les Oublies du Dimanche, won numerous prizes including the 2016 Lire Elire and Poulet-Malassis. The Forgotten Sunday (2015), won the Booksellers Choice Award and the paperback edition has been long-selling best-seller since publication. Her English-language debut, Fresh Water for Flowers (Europa, 2020), won the Maison de la Presse Prize, the Paperback Readers Prize, and was named a 2020 ABA Indies Introduce and Indie Next List title. It has been translated into over thirty languages. Figaro Littéraire named Perrin one of the ten best-selling authors in France in 2019, and in Italy, Fresh Water for Flowers was the best selling book of 2020. Perrin now lives in Normandy.

About the translator: Hildegarde Serle graduated in French from Oxford University. After working as a newspaper subeditor in London for many years, she obtained the Chartered Institute of Linguists Diploma in Translation. She is the translator of A Winter's Promise and The Missing of Clairdelune by Christelle Dabos and the novels by Valérie Perrin, including the international best-seller,  Fresh Water for Flowers. She lives in London. 

Rating: 5/5