There’s a Monster Behind the Door

€14.95

Author: Gaëlle Bélem
Translators: Karen Fleetwood, Laëtitia Saint-Loubert

The name Dessaintes is one to reckon with. A bombastic, violent and increasingly dangerous clan, little do they know that their downfall is being chronicled by one of their own.

This is La Réunion in the 1980s: high unemployment and low expectations, the legacy of postcolonialism. One little girl makes a bid for escape from her sadistic parents’ reign of terror and turns to school for salvation.

Rich in the history of the island’s customs and superstitions, and driven by a wild, offbeat humour, this picaresque tale manages to satirize the very notion of freedom available in this French territory, and perhaps even the act of writing itself and where it might lead you.

“Mother – mystical, fervent, passionate – ran back and forth, screamed like a wild boar with its throat cut and flung herself prostrate in our sweet potato patch.”

Winner of Grand Prix du Roman Métis (2020)
Winner of Prix André Dubreuil du Premier Roman (2020)

Publication date: 10 October, 2024.

Cover design by Niall McCormack.

‘A novel that is as beautiful as it is brutal. Life in La Reunion is described in brilliantly vivid, unflinching, and at times, humorous prose. This is a story that will transport you across the world with its incredible narrator, characters and places, but despite the distance, our narrator does what great voices do: whispers, we are all the same.’ Kevin Curran, author of Youth

‘Vivacious and mordantly funny, the tragicomic voice of There’s a Monster Behind the Door is forensically and brilliantly merciless.’ Wendy Erskine

‘Harsh, hilarious, spine chilling and heart warming – an unmissable French debut.’ Michelle Gallen

‘A tour-de-force as volcanic as the little island of La Réunion, a tiny sliver of France marooned in the Indian Ocean, “a heap of rubble on the edge of the world”. The narrator of Gaëlle Bélem’s novel, a little girl no-one wanted, the unloved daughter of the Dessaintes, is determined to be someone, to tell the story of her family, and through them the story of an island founded on slavery, poverty, cruelty and superstition with a caustic wit and a keen eye. It is a tragi-comedy worthy of Zola, candid and unflinching, yet shot through with humour and poignancy and even a glimmer of hope. Bélem’s novel is a joyous discovery and in Laëtitia Saint-Loubert and Karen Fleetwood she has found translators alert to the nuances of French and Creole and to the poetry threaded through this startling début.’ Frank Wynne, translator, 2022 International Booker Prize – chair of the judges

How miserable they were, those poor Dessaintes, with a baby girl with a full nappy and a rattle in their sitting room! They’d been expecting a perfect little male with a tyrannical nature and a fighting instinct! In other words, a complete idiot. Instead of him, the heavens had sent them just the sort of relentless, toothless cry-baby that were already thick on the ground in rue Descartes.
After my birth, Mother began to gain weight and Father began to smoke. Father smoked incessantly. But what was particularly unusual was that he never exhaled. The first few nights, as he bent over my crib enveloped in the curls of smoke coming from his cigarette, he wondered if it wouldn’t be best to strangle this wrinkly little creature in a babygrow stealing all their sleep. His love of the horses kept growing, as did Mother’s thoughts of divorce. But financial dependency, fear of a scandal and serious selfishness made them see sense: a family court judge would mean slipping back into destitution within the hour! A divorce would ruin them both, so there was only one triumphant ending possible: one of them would have to die. But since neither of them was in the mood to kick the bucket, they opted for a fallback solution and turned to the only thing that they still had in common: the money they didn’t have. They would raise this disgusting spawn and get some well-deserved financial compensation from the state. It was tacitly agreed between them that they would kick me out of the house as soon as I stopped bringing in money.
A photograph still bears witness to this. I am smiling, looking at the two faces bent over my crib. Father is smiling, thinking about the bets he would be placing over the next eighteen years. My mother is smiling because she was taught to always smile back when people smile at her.
They decided that the best way to get some peace and quiet between fights was to ignore me, just as one pretends to ignore those big house geckos that annoy everyone with their noise and excrement. It was only on days that they were in a very good mood that they bothered to impose their reign of terror on me and use their favourite catchphrase, ‘That’s the way it is and that’s that!’

Bookshops stocking There’s a Monster Behind the Door include:

Books Upstairs

Dubray Books

Kennys Bookshop

O’Mahony’s Booksellers

Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop

Liber

Original language: FrenchISBN: 9781739842369Format: PaperbackPages: 176Weight: 217 g