Books by Pascale Kramer

How can you imagine the worst when you are young and life is sunny? This novel reveals suffering at its most pure and most volatile as the affected people wonder, in the wake of tragedy, whether they should subsist with the living or with the dead.

[Kramers body of work is] precise and sumptuous . . . a song of emotion, but with a great lucidity about the humanity of simple people. Swiss Federal Office of Culture, Swiss Grand Prize for Literature citationYou need to read Pascale Kramers books because they take you on a journey. You board a small ship that enters the human body, and what you felt while reading follows you for days after youve closed the book. Elle (France)Restrained, chiseled, implacable, the novels of Pascale Kramer perfectly master the art of creating a diffuse discomfort. Poignant. Marie Claire (Switzerland)When a young woman returns to her childhood home after her estranged fathers death, she begins to piece together the final years of his life. What changed him from a prominent left-wing journalist to a bitter racist who defended the murder of a defenseless African immigrant? Kramer exposes a country gripped by intolerance and violence to unearth the source of a familys fall from grace.Set in Paris and its suburbs, and inspired by the real-life scandal of a French author and intellectual, Autopsy of a Father blends sharp observations about familial dynamics with resonant political and philosophical questions, taking a scalpel to the racism and anti-immigrant sentiment spreading just beneath the skin of modern society.Pascale Kramer, recipient of the 2017 Swiss Grand Prize for Literature, is the author of fourteen books, including three novels published in English: The Living, The Child, and Autopsy of a Father, which was named a finalist for the La Closerie des Lilas, Ouest-France, and Orange du Livre prizes. Born in Geneva, she has worked in Los Angeles, and now lives in Paris, where she directs a documentary film festival about childrens rights.