Forever Valley (European Women Writers)

This mesmerizing novel is about a sixteen-year-old girl who lives in a rectory and works in a dance hall. Gradually she embarks upon a "personal project": she digs pits in the rectory garden and "looks for the dead." Her story, which has brevity and magical intensity of a fairy tale, is marked equally by tragedy and dark humor. Forever Valley is one of three novels that are the first works to appear in English by Marie Redonnet, one of France's most original new authors (the other novels are HÔtel Splendid and Rose Mellie Rose, both also available from the University of Nebraska Press). Translator Jordan Stump notes that these books "unmistakably fit together, although they have neither characters nor setting in common." In all three novels, Redonnet has said, "it is the women who fight, who seek, who create."