Isabelle Nicou 'Stricture'

Isabelle Nicou returns with her fiercely imaginative new novel Stricture.

A dizzying, kaleidoscopic work of filial obligation, literary mentorship and childhood dreams of alien abduction.

"In Harry’s suburban house, cluttered with books and stacks of papers, time was bending in an elliptical orb that never failed to constrain me during the few months broken by vacations and interruptions—several, for Harry was often invited abroad—where I went once a week to, as my famous mentor put it, “assist” him.

"Around 9:30 in the morning, after he had come—often still in pajamas over which he put on a putty-colored raincoat—to look for me at the train station in his white Fiat Panda, after we had a cup of coffee in the kitchen and greeted his wife who was leaving for her job in Paris, in the fifth arrondissement, just a few streets over from my studio, I had to climb the stairs and get started."

Suffused with eroticism and troubling despair, Stricture is the work of a major talent at the very height of her considerable powers.

Paperback, 168 pages.