Turtles Bruno Pellegrino

A luminous book about memory, our passion for the lives of others, our need to preserve, and the opposite need to lighten up.

As a child, Bruno Pellegrino wakes up early on Sunday: he needs to clear out and rearrange his desk. In the bottom drawer: the things to save the day when the house will burn down. As an adult, whether he sorts through the archives of a deceased writer, sets out on the trail of an unknown poetess or seeks to fix a childhood memory, the question remains: what should we do when we have a panic fear of forgetting, when memory is more pleasant than living; and that at the same time, our greatest fantasy is lightening up to the point that a simple bundle is enough for everything we own?

About the author

Born in 1988, Bruno Pellegrino lives in Lausanne (Switzerland). Amongst his books, “There, August Is an Autumn Month” (2017) and “In the Temporary City” have won several prizes: Like Atlas (2015), . Bruno Pellegrino also co-wrote with Aude Seigne and Daniel Vuataz the two seasons of the literary series Stand-by (2018 and 2019) as well as a «station novel», Land-of-the-ends (2022).

“By veiling the images, oblivion gradually allowed me to see them more clearly, to invent a coherence. I had more pleasure in remembering these blurred things than I had in experiencing them at the time. I imagined a book built like a lacunar atlas, whose movement, without fidelity to real events, would follow the geographical organisation of my memory.”

• An endearing protagonist to recognize yourself in

• A galvanising self-humour

• “A nonchalant sweetness” Libération

Willibald

Novel / 160 pages

First Printed: September 2022

Rights

WORLD FRENCH: Éditions Zoé

English excerpt available

Rights sold

Mass market ppbk (Livre de poche)