The Secret of Mothers – Baer Sophie de – Phantom Press – 2026 – ISBN 978-5-907943-23-0
The Secret of Mothers
14.99 €
In stock
The Secret of Mothers
14.99 €
There are houses that know how to remain silent—and in Sophie de Baer's novel, an entire region is silent, the remote French town of Morvan, where Colette returns in 2004: her mother is dying, and her father and brother are still keeping to themselves what happened that July evening in 1969. "An accident" is all that is sparsely revealed, and behind this brief formulation, three generations of women hide something that screams even through the silence.
The novel begins as a seemingly simple saga of mothers and daughters, of love and silence, but it turns into a story with such detective tension that French readers seemed to complain unanimously: opened and vanished, impossible to put down, must be read to the last page. Marthe, in the Yé-Yé era, falls in love with Louis, and Lucien keeps his eyes on her, and everything hinges on a secret the characters hide not so much from each other as from the merciless village "what will people say"—in those days, when a woman had no room for error, no escape from the watchful eye of local moral guardians. And this isn't the Middle Ages—just half a century ago.
And beneath the fiction lies a nearly forgotten and entirely real page, one that leaves one uneasy. Behind Louis, the "little Parisian," stand the very same Petits-Paris: for over a century, children from a Parisian orphanage, under Napoleon's decree, were taken to impoverished Morvan, distributed to peasant families for food, and for decades the entire region made a business out of "feeding" the orphaned "little Parisians." This lasted until the 1970s—that is, almost yesterday.
Sophie de Baer is beloved in France for her rare ability to write about feelings quietly and precisely, without verbal flourishes—and once again, with a gentle cat's paw, she grabs you by the throat with an inescapable question: is it possible to keep someone else's secret without it seeping into your own life and detonating one day, like a mine planted a generation before you?
The novel begins as a seemingly simple saga of mothers and daughters, of love and silence, but it turns into a story with such detective tension that French readers seemed to complain unanimously: opened and vanished, impossible to put down, must be read to the last page. Marthe, in the Yé-Yé era, falls in love with Louis, and Lucien keeps his eyes on her, and everything hinges on a secret the characters hide not so much from each other as from the merciless village "what will people say"—in those days, when a woman had no room for error, no escape from the watchful eye of local moral guardians. And this isn't the Middle Ages—just half a century ago.
And beneath the fiction lies a nearly forgotten and entirely real page, one that leaves one uneasy. Behind Louis, the "little Parisian," stand the very same Petits-Paris: for over a century, children from a Parisian orphanage, under Napoleon's decree, were taken to impoverished Morvan, distributed to peasant families for food, and for decades the entire region made a business out of "feeding" the orphaned "little Parisians." This lasted until the 1970s—that is, almost yesterday.
Sophie de Baer is beloved in France for her rare ability to write about feelings quietly and precisely, without verbal flourishes—and once again, with a gentle cat's paw, she grabs you by the throat with an inescapable question: is it possible to keep someone else's secret without it seeping into your own life and detonating one day, like a mine planted a generation before you?
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