Dix r�ves de pierre

TEN DREAMS IN STONE Some epitaphs are powerfully evocative; reading them conjures the ghost of someone who may have died even centuries. In this collection Blandine Le Callet brings together real epitaphs, using them as springboards to imagine the final hours, final days or final months of the person's life. She resuscitates a slave girl who has just been granted freedom, a philanthropist trapped in the stifling secrecy of a Paris brothel, two individuals united by an extraordinary love as they head for the gallows, a cantankerous old woman writing her will, and many more besides Ten lives interrupted by death: gentle or violent, sudden or anticipated, alone or with others. Ten journeys between the past and the present, from the shores of ancient Asia Minor to a tiny village in deepest Brittany, from the Paris of the Ancien Régime to the same city in the nineteenth century, from medieval Normandy to Ukrainian plains devastated by the plague... Poetic or raging, tender or dramatic, nostalgic or darkly humorous, these ten short stories depict people who are prey to the same passions, the same fears and the same hopes. Ten "dreams in stone" to save as many lives from oblivion. Blandine Le Callet is the author of two novels, Une pièce montée (winner of the 2007 Livre de poche readers' prize) and La Ballade de Lila K (winner of the 2012 Livre de poche readers' prize).