Victorine - Softcover

"Texier does a skillful job of re-creating the rich insularity of the French provincial town. . . . [She has] the naturalness of a writer who is genuinely comfortable with the past." --The New York Times Book Review

"Brilliant. . . .the place itself is the seduction." --Bookforum

"Absorbing . . . The novelist's brilliance in evoking the quiet tensions of marriage and motherhood engender an immediate sympathy. . . Seamlessly interwoven are Victorine's reflections on her turbulent life, offering a glimpse back into the incredible pain and sense of betrayal her romantic whimsy caused." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Flaubert's classic hovers around the hem of this novel. . . . Texier has an unsparing sense of ethical complexity, the partial satisfaction that must suffice for a person torn between irreconcilable desires and responsibilities." --The Christian Science Monitor

"A spellbinding novel made all the more powerful by a profound examination of remorse." --The Sunday Advocate (Baton Rouge, LA)

"Mesmerizing . . . With lush, vivid description, Catherine Texier brings to life both the world around Victorine and the woman herself." -Booklist

"A novel of historic change, adventure and passion that keeps you feverishly turning the pages." -The Herald Express (UK)

"Lovely and original...A tantalizing mix of fact and fantasy: the author inhabits her great-grandmother's soul." -Laura Shaine Cunningham, author of Sleeping Arrangements and Dreams of Rescue

"While [Victorine] can be enjoyed simply for its love story, its period flavor, and its gorgeous settings, it also offers an honest portrayal of just how wrenching and lonely rebellion can be." --The Boston Globe

"Texier beautifully evokes the textures of daily life: a crisply told, rattling good tale."
-The Independent (UK)

"A steely, delicate fictional tale of unaccounted-for years in the life of Texier's own great-grandmother...reminiscent both of Madame Bovary and Duras' The Lover." -Publishers Weekly

"Texier knows how to do place, and mood, and how to make the reader understand the depth of personal dilemma. It's a haunting and remarkable read." -Joanna Trollope, author of Other People's Children

"A sensuous, devoted piece of work that works hard to evoke French domesticity and later the headily foreign atmosphere of colonial Vietnam." --The Miami Herald

"[An] evocative, erotic and enjoyable story." --Sunday Telegraph (UK)

"A marvelous achievement, a historical novel that reads less like an invention than like a discovery, a love story that has sprung to life of its own accord from an old trunk. Graceful, subtle and vivid." -Paul LaFarge, author of Haussmann, or the Distinction

"Romantic . . . Echoes of both Madame Bovary and Kate Chopin's The Awakening suffuse a nevertheless inventive and artfully composed delineation of a beguiling and complicated woman's arduous journey toward self-understanding. A subtly textured fourth novel: Texier's best yet." -Kirkus Reviews

"Elegant and affecting." -Scotland on Sunday

"Elegant as a pair of satin gloves, Catherine Texier's Victorine is the enchanting narrative of a unique womanÉThis is a seductive work of art." -Diana Abu-Jaber, author of Crescent

Witnessing Nazi patrols in the seaside town where she is spending the final years of her life, Catherine Texier examines her past, from the willow-lined canals of her childhood home, to her nights along the Mekong River at the turn of the twentieth century, to her decision to leave her family to start a new life with her lover in Indochina. By the author of Breakup. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.