A brief stay with the living

An exploration of loss and guilt, A Brief Stay with the Living is the story of a mother and her three grown-up daughters. Jeanne, the eldest, has moved to Argentina with her husband; Anne lives alone in Paris, but is in the throes of an unhappy affair with a married man; and Nore, the youngest, is in her first year at university but still living at home. Although not close, all four women are drawn together by an incident from their past - a secret that the story only gradually reveals. At once ethereal and incisive, and composed of a series of vivid mental postcards that evoke her themes of absence and disappearance, Darrieussecq's luminous prose involves us in the inner-lives of these characters in a way that is unique in contemporary fiction.