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.
‘A really beautiful, quiet novel. A story of secrets and family, asking and answering the question if one can ever really can go home again.’ LitHub
‘Dusapin’s storytelling and exploration of complicated female relationships evokes Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels and Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero.’ Willamette Weekly
‘Poignant.’ Wall Street Journal
‘Higgins effortlessly captures Dusapin’s ephemeral prose . . . the spaces left unfilled are what give the text its otherworldly magic.’ Los Angeles Review of Books
‘Quietly powerful.’ Financial Times
‘What do you get if you cross the Grimms’ fairytales with an Ann Patchett novel? . . . Dusapin stirs up some soul-stirring reflections . . . It’s an ideal book for this sweep-out-the-old, bring-in-the-new time of year.’ The Times
‘Charged with intimate undercurrents of both resentment and affection.’ Times Literary Supplement
‘Holds us in its spell . . . A moving tale of family strife.’ Daily Mail
‘Subtle, strange, complex.’ GQ
‘Evokes unresolved family history with subtle heat . . . spare, restrained . . . vivid and intriguing.’ Idra Novey, New York Times
‘A touching, mysterious novel, imbued with the beauty and strangeness of a fairy tale.’ Ayşegül Savaş
‘A bewitching meditation on tenderness and violence, intimacy and estrangement, The Old Fire will transport you to an ancient and wild place . . . A breathtaking achievement from one of my favourite living writers.’ Tess Gunty
‘Dusapin observes her characters with anthropological curiosity and great sensitivity. Her wisdom will astound you.’ Sanaë Lemoine
‘Dusapin combines acuity and depth with straight-shooting sentences that belie their profound emotional complexity. This is a subtle, propulsive, immensely powerful novel.’ Marina Kemp
‘I experienced the novel as a clarifying force, which, in its mysterious, almost silent way, showed me things I didn’t think I knew about loneliness, about sisters, about fire and water. The forest surrounding Agathe and Véra made an impression on me as keenly as their experience of each other.’ Lara Haworth
‘Prickly and compelling.’ Lizzy Stewart
‘Haunting, enigmatic, beautiful.’ Priscilla Morris
‘Moody, sensual and extremely elegant.’ Jenny Mustard
‘Dusapin has a rare and ferocious gift for pinning the quick, slippery, liveness of feeling to the page.’ Alexandra Kleeman
