Good Intentions
ABOUT
THE BOOK
Sonia is finally settling down. With her husband, Julien, she buys a flat in an apartment block in an up-and-coming quarter of the city. And she is pregnant with their first child. Family life begins and it feels good.
Yet her new apartment, it is soon obvious, is not the haven she had hoped. And Sonia’s befiefs in a decent, peaceful world, her disgust over racism, over poverty, soon make life very difficult for her as she allows herself to be drawn into a vicious and deeply unpleasant war between the odious apartment caretakers and a sad, lost widower who reaches out to her for help. When the threats and bullying slide beyond her control, Sonia is forced to realise that the cruelty of the world cannot simply be covered up with good intentions. With sly wit and a misleadingly light touch, Agnès Desarthe has created an unsettling picture of the world through an apartment building. And she has shown how, with the best will in the world, it can sometimes be the hardest thing of all to tell the good guys from the bad guys.
ABOUT
THE TRANSLATOR Adriana
Hunter
Adriana Hunter is an award-winning translator of French. Since “discovering” the first book she was to translate in 1998, she has translated more than 80 books, mostly works of literary fiction. She has won the Scott-Moncrieff prize and the French-American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation translation prize, and was shortlisted twice for the Independent foreign fiction prize (now the Man Booker international prize). In 2013, she won the 27th Annual Translation Prize founded by the French-American Foundation and the Florence Gould Foundation for her translation of Electrico W by Hervé Le Tellier (2013). She is also a contributor to Words Without Borders. She lives in Kent, England.
Adriana Hunter is an award-winning translator of French. Since “discovering” the first book she was to translate in 1998, she has translated more than 80 books, mostly works of literary fiction. She has won the Scott-Moncrieff prize and the French-American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation translation prize, and was shortlisted twice for the Independent foreign fiction prize (now the Man Booker international prize). In 2013, she won the 27th Annual Translation Prize founded by the French-American Foundation and the Florence Gould Foundation for her translation of Electrico W by Hervé Le Tellier (2013). She is also a contributor to Words Without Borders. She lives in Kent, England.