Translated by Rosie Eyre
 
WHAT IF, JUST like that, the world as we know it ended? For an aspiring writer living in a remote hamlet on the Swiss-French border, this once stranger-than-fiction scenario is about to become reality. It begins with the lights and internet cutting out one night – ‘no biggie’, so she thinks. But when her neighbours don’t return from their trip abroad, the cars vanish from the roads and the birds stop singing outside, every aspect of her life is thrown into question...
 
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Julie Guinand was born in 1989. She has published a collection of short stories and two novels. The latest of these, Survivante, received a literature prize from the cantons of Bern and Jura. She is a founding member of the writing collective AJAR, which has been an active part of the Swiss literary scene since its creation in 2012. Alongside her fiction writing for adults she works with children as a nursery practitioner, and likes to write for them too.
 
Rosie Eyre is a literary translator and editor working from French and Spanish. She studied Modern and Medieval Languages at the University of Cambridge and completed an MA in Translation Studies at the University of Manchester, where she was awarded the department’s Best Scholar Prize. From 2020–2021 she was the National Centre for Writing’s Emerging Translator mentee for Swiss French and she won Third Prize in the 2021 John Dryden Translation Competition for an extract from French novelist Alpheratz’s Requiem, which later appeared in the Journal of Comparative Critical Studies. Her previous published translations include Caring in Times of Covid-19 (2020), a book by photojournalist Juan Zarza documenting the work of Madrid collectives during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, and 100 First Words for Toddlers (2021), a bilingual picture book for young learners of French.