A vanished artist's diary hides a stranger manuscript in Phœbe Hadjimarkos Clarke's new novel
On France Culture's Le Book Club, the writer discussed her second book, built around a diary found after a disappearance and a cryptic text tucked inside it.
Phœbe Hadjimarkos Clarke's second novel opens with a disappearance: an artist vanishes, and what is left behind is her diary. Slipped between its pages is a second, stranger text — a manuscript written in an unfamiliar language that describes the siege of a city with no visible enemy, according to the summary given by France Culture ahead of her appearance on Le Book Club, broadcast on September 28.
France Culture frames the book as an exploration of "nos incertitudes contemporaines" — the uncertainties of the present — refracted through this doubled narrative: the intimate record of a life that has disappeared, and the encrypted account of a siege that resists straightforward reading.
No publisher, title beyond the working description, or publication date is given in the source material, and none is supplied here. The interview is available as a podcast on France Culture's site.
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