Serge Joncour Book order

A prize-winning bestseller in France, this is the unlikely love story of two lonely people in present-day Paris.

Winner of the 2020 Prix Femina, Human Nature charts the transformation of the French countryside through the story of one family against a backdrop of the 1976 drought and the storms of 1999.

A house on a French hillside. Two couples: the wife of a doctor presumed killed on the battlefields of the First World War, and a mysterious German lion tamer hiding his circus animals from requisition; and Parisian Franck and his wife Lise, who has booked them into the isolated gite to escape twenty-first century life. When a hungry wolfdog emerges from the forest, Franck begins to discover dark secrets about the house, and himself.

It was, without doubt, the white that reassured them. When a handsome blonde stranger interrupts a family holiday to introduce himself as an old school friend of their son, Philip, there is nothing to suggest his intentions may be malign. Philip has been away on holiday in America for 18 months and is due to arrive in Brittany any day, so his family, eager to meet any friend of their son, welcome Boris with open arms. Confident and charming, Boris quickly establishes himself as a centrepiece in the daily routine, organising midnight swims and daredevil boat rides as he gradually exerts a powerful influence over the family. Only one person remains impervious to Boris's charms - Andre-Plerre; Philip's brother-in-law. His knowledge of the real, secret reason that Philip has been in America for 18 months gives Andre-Plerre cause to be hugely suspicious of any 'friend' who imposes so forcefully upon perfect strangers. Why is Boris so evasive when it comes to talking about his school days? And why is he so hard to identify on an old school photo? man in their home, Boris seems to turn a malevolent eye towards him. BLINDING WHITE is chillingly quiet with a persistent sense of tension simmering beneath the surface image of a beautiful, elegant holiday among the French elite.