Little Skin

My son is alive. He’s asleep somewhere else. He’s safe, away from me—safe from his own mother. I’ve severed every connection, made a pile of my life of old and set it on fire. No more white powder—only ashes slipping through my fingers.

Prune has not been home for five days and five nights. Instead of being with her newborn son, she has sought refuge among men and women who, like her, take drugs to obliterate the present. Now, committed to a psychiatric institution, she begins—alongside her fellow patients—to confront what she has fled and imagine a different life.

Her thoughts return to her childhood in Mauritius, its smells and its colours, where she spent her happiest years before moving to France—and to the sense of belonging that has eluded her ever since. Caught between a beautiful but complicated French mother and a warmer yet absent Mauritian father, she has grown up amid laughter and turmoil. And now, years later, the birth of her own child has sent her adult life spinning out of control.

In this striking debut for fans of Violaine Huisman and Virginie Despentes, Marie Solal portrays a mother’s tragic descent and her search for salvation in drugs and alcohol. Vivid, original, and often biting, Little Skin is at once tender and violent: a searing account of motherhood, addiction, and the devastating force of inner exile.