La Femme De Gilles - Couverture souple

Elisa is Gilles' wife and her devotion to him is all-consuming. Her daily life is permeated by thoughts of him – thoughts of his return from the factory, thoughts of his footsteps on the path as he arrives home each evening, a sound which still paralyses her with anticipation.

But when Gilles suddenly finds himself powerfully and helplessly attracted to Elisa's younger sister, Victorine, Elisa's world is overturned. The joys of home and family are destroyed and her desperation is so profound that it begins to threaten her every sense of reality and the core of her existence.

Set among the dusty lanes and rolling valleys of rural Belgium in the 1930s, La Femme de Gilles is a sensual and shattering novel about infidelity, lust, and the loneliness of losing the one thing that matters most.

Madeleine Bourdouxhe was born in Belgium in 1906. La Femme de Gilles (1937) was her first novel. The outbreak of the Second World War interrupted her writing career, and her second novel, A la recherche de Marie, wasn't published until 1943. In the mid-1980s her work was rediscovered, and translated into many languages. A volume of short stories, A Nail, a Rose, first appeared in English in 1989, followed by translations of La Femme de Gilles and Marie. Bourdouxhe died in 1996.