ABOUT
THE BOOK

Translated from the original French by George Miller

2015 Longlist

Only a teenager when Delphine was born, Lucile raised two daughters largely alone. She was a former child model from a Bohemian family, younger and more glamorous than the other mothers: always in lipstick, wayward and wonderful. But as Delphine grew up, Lucile’s occasional sadness gave way to overwhelming despair and delusion. She became convinced she was telepathic, in control of the Paris metro system; she gave away all her money; she was hospitalized, medicated, and released in a kind of trance. Young Delphine was left to wonder: What changed her, or what shaped her all along?

In this brilliant investigation into her own family history, Delphine de Vigan attempts to “write her mother,” seeking out something essential as she interviews aging relatives, listens to recordings, and reads Lucile’s own writings. It is a history of luminous beauty and rambunctious joy, of dark secrets and silences. There are untimely deaths and failures of memory. There are revelations and there is the ultimately unknowable. And in the face of the unknowable, personal history becomes fiction: De Vigan must choose from differing accounts and fill in important gaps, using her writer’s imagination to reconstruct a life.

De Vigan writes her most expansive novel yet with acute self-awareness and marvelous sympathy. Nothing Holds Back the Night is a remarkable work, universally recognizable and singularly heartbreaking.

(From Publisher)

About the Author

Delphine de Vigan is the author of No and Me, which was a bestseller in France, where it was awarded the Prix des Libraires (The Booksellers’ Prize) in 2008, and in Britain, where it was a Richard and Judy selection. Underground Time was shortlisted for the prestigious Goncourt Prize in 2009. Her books have been translated into twenty-five languages. She lives in Paris.

About the Translator

George Miller is the translator of No and Me and Underground Time by Delphine de Vigan. He is also a regular translator for Le Monde diplomatique‘s English-language edition and the translator of Disordered World by Amin Maalouf.

Librarian’s Comments

This brilliant piece of reading, partly a biography and partly fiction, poignantly recounts an emotionally very fragile woman’s distressing life until the suicide. The author of the book strives to understand what led to to such a tragic end of life.

After the brutal death of her mother, Delphine de Vigan describes the person she was and what built her. This harrowing inquiry in to the heart of the familial memory reveals brighter memories as much as hidden secrets. Fascinating and very sensitive.