Nothing Holds Back the Night

In this moving autobiographical novel, the narrator’s mother, Lucile, raises her two daughters largely alone. A former child model from a large Bohemian family, Lucile is younger and more glamorous than the other mothers: always in lipstick and stylishly dressed, wayward and wonderful. But as the years pass her occasional sadness gives way to overwhelming despair and delusion. This is a story of luminous beauty and rambunctious joy, of dark secrets and silences, revelations and, ultimately, the unknowability of even those closest to us. And in the face of the unknowable, personal history becomes fiction. Nothing Holds Back the Night is universally recognisable and singularly heartbreaking.

An unsettling and raw monologue, even more so because of the cool control de Vigan sustains ... The only way to read this book is to stop, put it down, gasp, absorb the horrors and then read on. Shortlisted for eight major literary awards in France, it won two, and it is easy to see why. It is an overpowering work, almost impossible to assess because of the extreme behaviour described ... [will] leave a reader shaken and affected. How many books can do that?, Delphine de Vigan is a sensation, Thrilling, tender ... A genuinely shocking, incandescent read, Compassionate and powerful, as well as painful and shocking ... The luminous accuracy of the prose reminds me of Colette ... the Poirier family – parents and children – appear in a kind of Renoir sunlight, overflowing with life and vibrant personalities, almost enough to conceal the lurking darkness, Absolutely stunning. This remarkable book is not a memoir, a biography, an analysis or a novel: it is all these and more. It is about the struggle to weave sense out of mutinous threads, how silence breeds crisis, how we are made and unmade. “Gauging the extent of the mystery” that was her mother, de Vigan strips the psychodrama of family ties – the basis of every human life – to the bone

Delphine de Vigan is the author of No and Me, which was a bestseller in France (400,000 copies) and was awarded the Prix des Libraires (The Booksellers' Prize) in 2008 and in Britain was a Richard and Judy selection where it has sold more than 70,000 copies. Her other novels include Les Jolis Garçons and Soir de décembre. Underground Time was shortlisted for the Goncourt Prize in 2009. Her books have been translated into twenty-five languages. She lives in Paris. George Miller is the translator of No and Me and Underground Time. He is also a regular translator for Le Monde diplomatique's English-language edition, and the translator of Conversations with my Gardener by Henri Cueco, Inside Al-Qaeda by Mohammed Sifaoui and Disordered World by Amin Maalouf.