House of Shadows: The French List

In this extraordinary novel, Diane Meur calls upon an unusual narrator: the ancestral house itself—the House of Shadows of the title—which, from behind its unmoving façade, watches the comings and goings of generations of inhabitants. The house is everywhere in the story, hearing and observing everything; it encompasses all the shadows of a past that it knows better than its occupants do. But it envies the mobility of those who reside there, and though the years pass, nothing changes for the house.

 

Like the house, the Zemka women—mothers and daughters, aunts and nieces—are condemned to a certain immobility. At home, they wait for love, passion, and stories of the calamitous events on the horizon. On the threshold of the twentieth century, only one young woman manages to escape from beneath the weight of her family’s house and the historical conflagrations to come.