The Garden Square

Description

A young woman, working as a childminder for a living, takes her charge out to play in a Parisian garden square. Sitting on a bench, she starts talking to a stranger, a travelling salesman, and their conversation gradually turns into an exchange of confidences, as she speaks of her desire for a more stable future and he of his feelings of rootlessness and disillusionment. As the afternoon wears on, the two sense an increasing connection between them. Understated and impressionistic, and consisting almost entirely of dialogue, The Garden Square is one of Marguerite Duras's finest novels, which she also adapted to the stage.

Prix Goncourt winner Marguerite Duras (1914-96) is one of the most influential figures in French postwar literature, with The Sea Wall, The Lover and Moderato Cantabile among her most famous novels.

Duras's sentences lodge themselves slowly in the reader's mind until they detonate with all the force of fused feeling and thought. * The New York Times Book Review *