Maylis de Kerangal, author of Repairing the Living, returns with a novel that reads like a thriller but functions as something else: “a labyrinth of layers that are revealed page by page,” according to French critics.
The narrator, a film and audiobook voice actress based in Paris, receives a call from the police because her number is the only clue found in the pocket of a man who died on the Normandy coast. She doesn’t know him (or so she thinks), but she agrees to return to Le Havre, the port city where she grew up and which she hadn’t visited in years. There, as the investigation progresses without providing any answers, she stays a few more hours and lets herself be swept away by the docks, movie theaters, and bars of her teenage years.
The central character in Día de mareas is the city itself, rebuilt from the ruins of the World War II bombings, and memory is its tide: what seemed buried rises to the surface—in this case, a first love that was abruptly cut short. French critics have described it as a “false noir” that plays with the styles of Hitchcock and David Lynch. Anagrama is publishing it in Spanish, translated by Álex Gibert, and Angle Editorial is publishing it in Catalan as Mar de fons, translated by Jordi Martín Lloret.
Where can I buy it? Día de mareas has been available in bookstores since October 7.
