• ISBN13: 9780857423726
• Binding: Hardcover
• Subject: English Literature
• Publisher: Seagull Books
• Publisher Imprint: Seagull
• Publication Date: September 16, 2017
• Pages: 232
• Original Price: INR 595.0
• Language: English
• Edition: N/A
• Item Weight: 390 grams

Swiss novelist Catherine Colomb is known as one of the most unusual and inventive francophone novelists of the twentieth century. Fascinated by the processes of memory and consciousness, she has been compared to that of Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust. The Spirits of the Earth is the first English translation of Colomb’s work and its arrival will introduce new readers to an iconic novel.The Spirits of the Earth is at heart a family drama, set at the Fraidaigue château, along the shores of Lake Geneva and in the Maison d’en Haut country mansion, located in the hills above the lake. In these luxe locales, readers encounter upper-class characters with faltering incomes, parvenues and even ghosts. Throughout, Colomb builds a psychologically penetrating and bold story in which the living and the dead intermingle and in which time itself is a mystery.

Catherine Colomb has long been considered one of the most original writers of twentieth-century Switzerland. Except for stays, in her youth, in Weimar, Potsdam, Berlin, Paris and London (where she met members of the Bloomsbury Circle), Colomb spent her entire life in the canton of Vaud, living in Yverdon-les-Bains, Lausanne and Prilly. It is known that she read Balzac, Hölderlin, Jean Paul and especially Proust, as well as, late in life, Virginia Woolf. But she fashioned her exceptional style and formally innovative fictions in relative isolation.