Hélène Bessette – författare

A New Yorker Best Book of 2025Shortlisted for the 2025 French-American Foundation Translation PrizeLili Is Crying, Hélène Bessette’s debut novel, conveys with singular force the fraughtness and depth of the troubling relationship between Lili and her mother, Charlotte. With a near-mythic quality, Bessette's stripped-back prose evokes at once the pain of thwarted love—of desire run cold—and the promise of renewal. Lauded by critics on its initial 1953 publication for its boundary-pushing style, Lili Is Crying catapulted Bessette to cult status in France. The novel is moving and maddening in turns, with its characters trapped in their own cruelties and sorrows, but in its spareness and strength it feels true. "Show me a woman who's chosen something." Bessette's books were hailed for their unusual economy of expression, rarity, strange humor, and sheer vivacity. She characterized her new kind of novel as "a freshly cut slice of life, whose force comes from its lack of commentary."

Lili is Crying, Hélène Bessette’s debut novel, explores the fraughtness and depth of the troubling relationship between Lili and her mother Charlotte. With a near-mythic quality, Bessette’s stripped-back prose evokes at once the pain of thwarted love – of desire run cold – and the promise of renewal. Lauded by critics on its initial publication in 1953 for its boundary-pushing style, unusual economy of expression, strange humour and sheer vivacity, Lili is Crying announces Bessette’s singular take on the ‘poetic novel’. This edition marks the very first translation of Bessette’s work into English, by Windham-Campbell Prize-winning author and translator Kate Briggs.

In a family home in the north of France, a crime has been committed. But a crime of what order? Who exactly is the victim and who, if anyone, is the criminal? In Twenty Minutes of Silence, Hélène Bessette unleashes a polyphonic investigation, multiplying perspectives, contradictions, questions and doubts. Everything in this high-octane drama is subject to change, including the lighting and the basic facts of the case. Composed in her signature poetic prose style, Bessette’s novella builds a world punctured by startling disruptions and unexpected shifts, and in doing so destroys and remakes the crime novel, creating a form wholly new. Devastating and exuberant, Twenty Minutes of Silence is a vital interrogation of the powerlessness of childhood, the compromises of adulthood, and the conventions of the novel itself.