All About Sarah

An intoxicating and evocative debut novel about the all-consuming love affair between two women and the ruin it leaves in its wake.

It's all about Sarah, her mysterious beauty, Sarah the impetuous, Sarah the passionate, Sarah the sulphurous, it's all about the exact moment when the match flares, the exact moment when that piece of wood becomes fire, when the spark lights up the darkness.

A thirty-something teacher drifts through her life in Paris, raising a daughter on her own, lonely in spite of a new boyfriend. Then one night, at a friend's tepid New Year's Eve party, Sarah enters the scene like a tornado. A talented young violinist, she is loud, vivacious, appealingly unkempt in a world where everyone seems preoccupied with being 'just so'. It is the beginning of an intense relationship, tender and violent, that will upend both women's lives.

A literary sensation in France, All About Sarah perfectly captures the pull of a desire so strong that it blinds us to everything else.

“[ All About Sarah ] moves impressively from the chaos and noise of love, to silence and solitude , like a spun coin settling.”

There are shades of Duras, Nabokov, and Barthes in the intensely living heart of this magnificent novel. L'Express A story of desire and desolation. -- Kim Willsher Guardian [All About Sarah] moves impressively from the chaos and noise of love, to silence and solitude, like a spun coin settling. -- John Self Observer

Pauline Delabroy-Allard (Author) Pauline Delabroy-Allard was born in 1988, and lives in Paris. All About Sarah is her debut novel.

Adriana Hunter (Translator) Adriana Hunter has translated some eighty books, mostly works of literary fiction. She won the 2011 Scott-Moncrieff Prize for her translation of Veronique Olmi's Beside the Sea, and was twice shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. She lives in Kent, England.

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