Faces On The Tip Of My Tongue

Meetings, partings, loves & losses in rural France are dissected with warm compassion, in Emmanuelle Pagano’s wonderful collection of stories that weave together the mad, the mysterious & the dispossessed in rural France with honesty & humour

"A treasure hunt that you can follow from title to title...fine-tipped drawings of little bits of the world that attach themselves to each other imperceptibly."  — Xavier Houssin, Le Monde

The late wedding guest isn’t your cousin but a drunken chancer. The driver who gives you a lift isn’t going anywhere but off the road. Snow settles on your car in summer & the sequins found between the pages of a borrowed novel will make your fortune. Pagano’s stories weave together the mad, the mysterious & the dispossessed of a rural French community with honesty & humour. 

A superb, cumulative collection from a unique French voice.  This is a spellbinding web of stories about people on the periphery. Emmanuelle Pagano makes rural France her subject matter. She invokes the closeness of a local community & the links between the inhabitants’ lives. But then she reminds us how little we know of each other.

Translated by Sophie Lewis & Jennifer Higgins

Emmanuelle Pagano was born in Rodez, southern France in 1969. Her 15 novels have been translated into more than 15 languages.  She has won multiple awards for her writing, including the EU Prize for Literature for One Day I’ll Tell You Everything, & the French Ecology Novel Prize. Faces on the Tip of My Tongue is her second book to appear in English. She regularly collaborates with artists working in other disciplines.