"AT LAST, SOMETHING NEW!" -- Raymond Queneau "Living literature, for me, in France todayits Hélčne Bessette." -- Marguerite Duras "It is as if the genre of the novel has been subject to something like a process of phenomenological reduction. There is power: close, binding, and unevenly distributed. And as part of this, there are processes. Charging the atmosphere. Its an electric storm. It started, were not told whenand it hasnt ended yet. It continues. It is not clear (if and) when it will stop. Lili is crying." -- Kate Briggs "Lili is Crying is stunning: a choral fever-dream of a book cycling through passion and despair, loyalty and betrayal. Bessettes cadence and lyrical concision are bewitching and necessarily airless, much like the mother-daughter relationship they chronicle. Its also a vivid and unforgettable portrait of place a sun-drenched landscape with world war at its fringes, and the slow fade of one era into another. Kate Briggss translation is a powerful channelling of Bessettes voice: distinct, unapologetic and eerily present. " -- Daisy Lafarge, author of Lovebug "Lili is Crying is not straightforwardly tragic as the title may initially trick us into believing but darkly funny, marvellously strange, insistently performative and, somehow, truer than true." -- Saba Sam, author of Send Nudes "This book is brilliant and bizarre, a Grey Gardens-esque tragicomedy, as if written by a sinister cousin of Stevie Smith." -- Camilla Grudova, author of The Coiled Serpent "[ Lili Is Crying] felt electric and urgent, as if Bessette should have long been in my canon, with Ingeborg Bachmann or Elizabeth Hardwick, Lynne Tillman and Annie Ernaux. Lili shares the cartoons casual violence, which is not to say the novel is comic, though at times it is, yes, darkly funny. It is beautiful, brutal." -- Jennifer Kabat - 4columns "Bessettes prose is prickly and snappy [ in this] tale of bust-ups, mistakes and life-ruining decisions in a fiery, fickle relationship between a mother and daughter. " -- The Spectator
