About the book: Octave says it couldn’t have been easy for Véra, growing up with a sister as brilliant as me.
In the wake of her father’s death, Agathe leaves New York and returns to her childhood home in the French countryside, after fifteen years away. She and her sister Véra have not seen each other in all that time apart.
Now, they must empty their home before it is knocked down. Véra stopped speaking when she was six, and as the pair clean and sift through a lifetime’s worth of belongings, old memories and resentments surface.
Tender, melancholic and evocative, The Old Fire is an exploration of time and memory, of family and belonging, of the unsaid and the unanswered. It is also a graceful and profound exploration of how loss and grief can live alongside life and abundance.
The Old Fire is out on 29 January 2026.
The Old Fire is translated from the French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins.
About the author: Elisa Shua Dusapin was born in France in 1992 to a French father and a South Korean mother and grew up in Paris, Seoul, and Porrentruy, a town in the Swiss canton of Jura. She studied at the Swiss Literature Institute in Biel and presented her debut novel, Hiver à Sokcho [Winter in Sokcho, 2020], in 2016. The jury of the Robert Walser Prize, which she was awarded in 2016, declared the novel "a small masterpiece". The English translation received the prestigious US National Book Award in the Translated Literature category in 2021.
Elisa Shua Dusapin’s second novel, Les Billes du Pachinko [The Pachinko Parlour, 2022], was awarded a Swiss Literature Award in 2019.
Her most recent publication, Vladivostok Circus [2020], like its two predecessors, highlights a unique set of relationships. Le Figaro declared that "each of her words contains a world…The author’s style is as beautiful as the relationships she describes. She remains true to herself and allows cultures and continents to embrace each other in a poetic way. A sublime spectacle".
The author lives near Porrentruy, Switzerland.
About the translator: Aneesa Abbas Higgins is an award-winning translator. She has been translating literary works from French for the past ten years. Before becoming a translator, she taught French for many years. Just six years after publishing her first translation, Aneesa Abbas Higgins won the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature for Elisa Shua Dusapin’s Winter in Sokcho. In addition to winning the National Book Award in 2021, her work was named the winner of the Scott Moncrieff Prize (A Girl Called Eel by Ali Zamir) in 2020, and was twice shortlisted for that same award. Her published translations include works by Nina Bouraoui, Tahar Ben Jelloun, François Garde and Vénus Khoury-Ghata. Her translations have also appeared in Words Without Borders and Asymptote. She lives in London.
For a full list of Aneesa Abbas Higgins' translations, please see https://free99656.wordpress.com/
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