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  • Published: 28 February 2023
  • ISBN: 9781635422108
  • Imprint: Other Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $37.99
Categories:

Theseus, His New Life

A Novel




A mesmerizing, poetic autofiction about the quest to find meaning in family tragedies, and a sense of self after loss.

In 2012, Theseus heads east in search of a new life, fleeing the painful memories of his past: the suicide of his older brother, the death of his mother, shortly followed by the death of his father. He takes three boxes of archives, leaving everything in disarray, and boards the last night train with his children. He thinks he’s heading toward the light, toward a reinvention, but the past quickly catches up to him.
 
With a stunning mix of poetry and prose, Camille de Toledo beautifully captures the conflicting urges to look back at or away from our complex histories, made all the more poignant through the scattered contents of Theseus’s archives—black-and-white photos, fragments of handwritten notes.

  • Published: 28 February 2023
  • ISBN: 9781635422108
  • Imprint: Other Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $37.99
Categories:

About the authors

Camille de Toledo

Camille de Toledo is an acclaimed French writer, academic, therapist, and artist whose genre-bending work masterfully blends fable, memoir, history, and narrative. Educated in Paris, London, and New York, he is the author of five celebrated novels, as well as essays, operas, and plays. His English-language debut, Theseus, His New Life, was a finalist for the 2021 Goncourt Prize and won the Franz Hessel Prize for Contemporary Literature and the French Academy’s Prix Henri de Régnier. Born in Lyon, de Toledo currently lives in Berlin.

Willard Wood

Willard Wood grew up in France and has translated more than thirty works of fiction and nonfiction from the French. He has won the Lewis Galantière Award for Literary Translation and received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Translation. He lives in Norfolk, Connecticut.

Praise for Theseus, His New Life

“A beautiful text with the weight of a myth and the sadness of a dirge.” Le Monde

“[De Toledo] explores the familial labyrinth, pulling us in with enchanting, captivating, harrowing prose.” La Croix