Nancy Huston

The year is 1957 and the place is Paris, where the psychic wounds of World War II have barely begun to heal. Saffie, a young German woman, becomes maid, then wife, to Raphael, a privileged French musician who finds her remoteness provocative and irresistable. One day in the old Jewish quarter of the city, where she …

Slow Emergencies opens with an unforgettable scene of childbirth, evokes a loving connection between a woman and man and their children, and describes an irresistible impulse to create a distance from and ultimately to abandon one's family. This powerful, seemingly negative, energy is nevertheless always a movement …