Casablanca, 1955. At low tide, Reine lies on the “Rock of the Condemned.” That morning, after settling her daughter Rose on the sand, she returned to this stony islet where, six years earlier, she had spent countless hours, hidden from view, in the arms of her lover Jean. Why this pilgrimage? She has just learned that Jean is dead. The man she had so long hoped would return will never come to save her—from her cruel aunt, her depraved brother, and the captive life that awaits her beside her husband François, within the cloistered world of a bourgeoisie enjoying its final years of splendor under the French Protectorate. Memories flood back: her birth in France to a large family in the 1930s; poverty; her mother’s death; her adoption by a couple of notables later overtaken by the horror of the Shoah; an uncle’s invitation to Morocco; her lover’s mysterious disappearance; and the loveless marriage that closed in around her like a trap…
Élise Lépine’s debut novel reads like an intimate saga—an epic of a luminous yet despairing heroine who, in the end, must choose her own fate.
