Nothing Belongs to You

"A novel of exceptional emotional force" John Self, Guardian

A Financial Times Fiction in Translation Book of the Year 2023

It's not only grief and loneliness that have tormented Tara since her husband's death. In her, something rises and crests like a wave. As she sits in squalor in a house that once knew love, she hears the deafening cry of a past she thought was stifled and the resurgence of the person she had been before. A girl with another name, who loved to laugh and dance, who believed in the innocence of childhood until she was overtaken by her country's demons.

With her characteristic lyricism and precision, Nathacha Appanah offers us total immersion into a world of lost futures and hidden pasts, in which the implacable hand of fate can only be resisted at a price.

Translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman

Nothing Belongs to You is a physical novel - its sentences grab you by the throat, devour you, haunt you. The prose is magnificent because from its shadows and its ghosts, a light emerges, despite everything. A tour de force -- Mohammed Aïssaoui Le Figaro
Nathacha Appanah has penned an unsettling novel, full of imaginative, dizzying and hypnotic prose -- Linda Pommereul Page des Libraires
A wonderful return to Nathacha Appanah's sensual and committed writing on the condition of women and the state of the world Le Point
Refusing to take the easy way out, the writer avoids the traps of pathos or of pity. Nathacha Appanah is one of our most singular novelists -- Hubert Artus Le Parisien
A deeply moving book of rare literary power -- Clémence Roux Marie France
A novel of exceptional emotional force -- John Self Guardian

Nathacha Appanah was born in Mauritius in 1973. She was brought up there and worked as a journalist before moving to France in 1998. The Last Brother, her first novel to be translated into English, was awarded the FNAC Fiction Prize in 2007 in its French edition. Her novel Tropic of Violence was winner of the Prix Femina des Lyceens in 2016, as well as seven other French literary awards.

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