Faces on the Tip of My Tongue

Meetings, partings, loves and losses in rural France are dissected with compassion.

The late wedding guest isn't your cousin but a drunken chancer. The driver who gives you a lift isn't going anywhere but off the road. Snow settles on your car in summer and the sequins found between the pages of a borrowed novel will make your fortune. Pagano's stories weave together the mad, the mysterious and the dispossessed of a rural French community with honesty and humour. A superb, cumulative collection from a unique French voice.

Why Peirene chose to publish this book:

This is a spellbinding web of stories about people on the periphery. Pagano makes rural France her subject matter. She invokes the closeness of a local community and the links between the inhabitants' lives. But then she reminds us how little we know of each other.

'Devastatingly beautiful.' Le Soir, Belgium

'A treasure hunt that you can follow from title to title…fine-tipped drawings of little bits of the world that attach themselves to each other imperceptibly.' Xavier Houssin, Le Monde

'Pagano succeeds because of the range of her insight and the skill with which she shifts register: from wistfulness to blunt force, or from fantasy to naturalism.' Chris Power, The Guardian

'Endlessly beautiful and poignant.' Le Monde books of the year 2012

'With animal writing, Emmanuelle Pagano invites herself to the side of rebels and solitaries.' Marine Landrot, Télérama



Emmanuelle Pagano was born in Rodez, southern France, in 1969. Her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages and she has won many awards for her work, including the EU Prize for Literature in 2009 and, most recently, the Prix du Roman d'Écologie in 2018. This is her second book to appear in English. The first, Trysting, was published in 2016 by And Other Stories.