Lili is Crying

‘I’m grateful to Kate Briggs for her translation of Lili Is Crying – a tragic, comic, invigorating book with an eccentric staccato style that blurs speech and thought.’
— Kathryn Scanlan, author of Kick the Latch

‘A manic, brilliant maze of a book. Circular, cinematic, comic.’
— Sinéad Gleeson, author of Hagstone

'Lili is Crying is stunning: a choral fever-dream of a book cycling through passion and despair, loyalty and betrayal. Bessette’s cadence and lyrical concision are bewitching and necessarily airless, much like the mother-daughter relationship they chronicle. It’s also a vivid and unforgettable portrait of place – a sun-drenched landscape with world war at its fringes, and the slow fade of one era into another. Kate Briggs’s translation is a powerful channelling of Bessette’s voice: distinct, unapologetic and eerily present.'
— Daisy Lafarge, author of Lovebug

‘Lili is Crying is not straightforwardly tragic – as the title may initially trick us into believing – but darkly funny, marvellously strange, insistently performative and, somehow, truer than true.’
— Saba Sams, author of Send Nudes

‘This book is brilliant and bizarre, a Grey Gardens-esque tragicomedy, as if written by a sinister cousin of Stevie Smith.’
— Camilla Grudova, author of The Coiled Serpent

‘AT LAST, SOMETHING NEW.’
— Raymond Queneau, author of Zazie in the Metro

‘Living literature, for me, in France today – it’s Hélène Bessette.’
— Marguerite Duras