My Favourite

Winner of the English PEN Translates award and the Swiss Prix Goncourt

In 1970s Switzerland, high up in the Valais mountains, is a village where everyone knows everything, and no one says anything.

Jeanne learns from an early age to dodge her father’s abuse, but her mother and sister resign themselves to his brutality. One day when she is eight he attacks her viciously, angered by her self-assurance. Convinced that the village doctor will put an end to their nightmare, she is shocked by his silence.

From then on, Jeanne’s hatred of her father and her disgust at the doctor’s cowardice drive her on. At boarding school she experiences five years of respite, but is then triggered by an unbearable replica of the violence that started it all. Moving to Lausanne, unable to come to terms with her past and to engage fully with life, she nevertheless finds solace in the arms of lovers and in the waters of Lake Geneva, while further tragedy fuels her rage.

My Favourite is a powerful novel about departure and return, of love, guilt and shame, and the paralyzing effects of trauma. Sarah Jollien-Fardel forcefully describes the price to be paid for Jeanne’s hard-won emancipation, as history inexorably repeats itself.