Le Fil d’Ariane. Le Jardin d’Ariane. Nadja

19.5 × 28 cm 224 pages in color softback september 2021 retail price: 27 €

19.5 × 28 cm 40 pages in color softback september 2021 retail price: 15 €

Récit d’une trahison

ARIADNE’S THREAD

A tale of betrayal

ARIADNE’S GARDEN

Nadja

Nadja

Nadja explores the myth of Ariadne, abandoned by Theseus after his victory over the Minotaur, and seeks to understand what she is feeling inside. She rejects the idea of the tearful victim of unrequited love, sensing instead another kind of truth. Ariadne has disappeared and her sister hires Dyonis, a private detective who picks up her trail through her private diaries and follows her into the labyrinth into which she has plunged, losing and finding her way again as she tracks her ancient homonym. A labyrinth of time, the passions and writing where both the real and the imaginary trace out the present. In her wanderings, Ariadne encounters a series of figures including a little girl who is another Ariadne – a Doppelganger. Nadja plays with her figurines in her little mythological theatre and decides to devote a book to this child. A riadne is a little girl who has created this extraordinary garden full of child’s treasures, dolls, shells and pieces of colored glass. She comes across a figurine of a bull whose neck bears a red mark and places it in her garden, which is a sort of labyrinth. Suddenly, an alarmed woman appears and Ariadne offers to help her…

Nadja was born in 1955 in Alexandria, Egypt, of a painter mother and a doctor father of Lebanese origin. Her childhood in Lebanon and the Paris region was atypical to say the least: no formal schooling but classes by correspondence instead until the age of thirteen, and above all a host of stories told and drawn by her mother Olga Lecaye. In 1989 with Chien bleu, an album of wild opaque watercolors, Nadja won the Montreuil Prix Totem du Salon for young adult books. Painting had entered into her work and many albums in the same vein followed with their distinct expressionist style and full-page paintings. For grown-ups, she has also created graphic novels, including L’Homme de mes rêves (Cornelius), Les Filles de Montparnasse (Olivius) and Ô cruelle (Actes Sud). She lives in Paris and divides her time between painting and illustration.