Sandrine Collette, disgruntled Goncourt finalist, is not leaving the literary awards season empty-handed. The 2024 Goncourt Prize for high school students was awarded on Thursday, November 28 to his novel Madelaine before dawn (JC Lattès, 250 pages, 20.90 euros), a dark, singular and powerful story about a girl’s strength to live, announced from Rennes the jury representing around fifty institutes from all over France.
“What an adventure!” It must be one of the rare times that I am at a loss for words, I think my heart is beating too fast, it doesn’t reflect my joy, otherwise I would be jumping around saying a lot of bad words, I’m going to avoid it.. Thank you very much! »The author, contacted by telephone by the jury, reacted immediately.
It is a writer coming from “black” who is thus crowned. Born in 1970, Sandrine Collette waited until she was 40 to write her first novel. steel knotswith its two horrible crazy characters who lock the protagonist in a basement to make him their slave, was published by Denoël in his film noir collection “Cold Sweats” and won the Grand Prix for police literature in 2013. His next books, A wind of ashes, six white ants AND the dust remains (Denoël, 2014, 2015 and 2016) make her a figure of the French thriller. His transfer to JC Lattès for And always the forestsIn 2020 (Grand Prix RTL-Lire), she materializes her transition from black to more or less dark gray, and removes the label of thriller author.
“The Hunger Girl”
Madelaine before dawn It is his eleventh novel. Its strength is due in part to the very harsh universe that is represented so well there. A small, isolated French town, near a forest worthy of stories that make children shudder. Some families there face a series of calamities: excessively cold winters, famines and the harshness of the son of neighboring lords, always ready to rape the women who pass by. In this fragile community trying to survive, the appearance of Madelaine, a little “hungry girl”wild and brave, he turns everything upside down.
Added to this harsh framework are a handful of unique characters, as well as a subtle construction that provides suspense and dramatic turns: two-thirds of the way through the story, a surprise emerges so spectacular that as soon as the book ends, we read again. to detect the clues that we had missed. The story benefits above all from a writing that is alternately dark and luminous, from a rough beauty, with its sometimes old words, its jerks and its sentences that stop prematurely.
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