The building looks tired, the ivy-covered roof sagging above the brick-work, like a weary giant gasping for breath. There's a car parked under the hazelnut tree. Bracken forces its way between the cracks in the front steps. Through the window, I can see a light inside.

In the wake of her father's death, Agathe leaves New York and returns to her childhood home in the French countryside, after fifteen years away. Agathe and her sister Vera have not seen each other in all that time apart. Now, they must empty their home before it is knocked down. Vera stopped speaking when she was six, and as the pair clean and sift through a lifetime's worth of belongings, old memories and resentments surface.

Tender, melancholic, and evocative, The Old Fire is Elisa Shua Dusapin's most personal and moving novel yet. An exploration of time and memory, of family and belonging, of the unsaid and the unanswered, it is also a graceful and profound exploration of how loss and grief can live alongside life and abundance.


'Quietly powerful ... there is an ethereal quality to Dusapin's writing that lifts her work to another dimension ... it is economical yet beautiful, her prose sparse and poetic in Aneesa Abbas Higgins' translation. Descriptions sing.'
-Financial Times

'Higgins effortlessly captures Dusapin's ephemeral prose ... the spaces left unfilled are what give the text its otherworldly magic.'
-Los Angeles Review of Books

'Eerie yet tender ... Reading this atmospheric novel I was at times disorientated but after finishing I felt a strange calm. In a short space - only 176 pages - Dusapin stirs up some soul-stirring reflections.'
-The Sunday Times