Critiques en avant-première

Jocelyn and Simon are unlikely neighbors in a luxury condo building on the Pacific Coast Highway. Simon is, by all appearances, the ultimate American success story: a Rwandan refugee who has become a successful landscape architect. But Simon’s tasteful, spare apartment is filled with ghosts—the daughter he lost twenty years ago in the genocide, and the men who took her. Jocelyn has the same immaculate accessories as the wealthy white women who populate her world—charming husband, her beautiful mixed-race daughter, python handbag—but her body is marked by her traumatic childhood. A fine net of scars covers her back, and worse, she senses that there is something in her—a smudge, a stain—that invited abuse when she was young, which she thinks she has passed on to her child. The careful equilibrium of both lives is disturbed when Jocelyn enters into an unlikely affair with her female tennis coach and Simon is confronted with a letter that tells him that his daughter, whom he thought he had lost forever, is alive and wants to reconnect with him now she is expecting a child of her own. In writing that is bold and evocative, SMALL SILENT THINGS examines the ways we restlessly coexist with our own past selves, and the wonder and horror we are capable of in our ferocious love for our children.