Alexandra Fuller

Comme on fixe le soleil

August 28, 2025

Novel

286 pages

140 × 225 mm

22,90 €

978-2-2593-2099-3

Translated from the English by Marie Hermet

“Feux croisés” collection

Alexandra Fuller, Comme on fixe le soleil

After the sudden death of her son Fi, Alexandra Fuller embarks on a journey across the American West—from Wyoming to Hawaii, from the Rockies to New Mexico—attempting to survive the unbearable. This is not a story of grief: it’s the story of a metamorphosis.

Accompanied by Till, she settles in the middle of the forest, seeking a language capable of expressing the unspeakable, a space where memory, rage, beauty and redemption can coexist. Inspired by her childhood in Zimbabwe, she invents her own path, between African and Native American traditions and shared silences, in order to overcome this ordeal for her daughters, who need her.

Carried by incandescent language, alternately moving and funny, Comme on fixe le soleil is an intimate epic, the diary of a broken heart that gradually learns to beat differently.

By the author of Larmes de pierre and L’Arbre de l’oubli, a story of rare power, selected among the best books of the year by the New York Times.

The author

Alexandra Fuller grew up in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe).
She is the author of seven books, translated in a dozen countries, and numerous articles. Her two volumes of stories, Larmes de pierre and L’Arbre de l’oubli, were among the best books of the year in the New York Times, which compared the author to Karen Blixen, Doris Lessing and Nadine Gordimer.
She has lived in Wyoming, USA, since 1994.

Praise

“A mesmeric celebration of a boy who died too soon, of a mother’s love and her resilience.”

The New York Times.

“A meditation on motherhood and grief, written in the rage and pain caused by the loss of a child, but in a tone that ultimately resonates with beauty and hard-won acceptance.”

Prix Pullitzer’ jury.