Our Life in the Forest - Pre Order - Available Sept 2026

Synopsis

In this darkly funny novel, where the dystopian visions of Helen DeWitt and Kazuo Ishiguro meet, a woman writes from a forest encampment at the end of the world.

In the near future, the unnamed narrator is nearing the end of her life. She's lost an eye, a kidney, and the use of one hand, and knows she won't have time to reread the pages she's writing. Her other half, Marie—known as Sissy—has become entangled in a system that harvests the bodies of the poor to extend the lives of the wealthy. As society fractures and the forest becomes a refuge, the narrator records a story of love, resistance, and survival.

Darkly comic, unsettling, and deeply humane, Our Life in the Forest is Marie Darrieussecq's visionary exploration of complicity, mortality, environmental collapse, and what it means to remain human in an increasingly inhuman world.

About the Author

Marie Darrieussecq is a French novelist, translator, and psychoanalyst whose work has been translated into more than thirty languages. Since the international success of her debut novel Pig Tales (Truismes), she has become one of France's most acclaimed contemporary writers. Her fiction explores identity, the body, ecology, memory, and transformation with wit, originality, and emotional depth. Our Life in the Forest is translated from the French by Penny Hueston.

Publisher
Transit Books

Publication Date
September 11, 2026

Format
Paperback

Pages
136

Subjects
Literary Fiction · Fiction in Translation · Dystopian Fiction · Speculative Fiction · Climate Fiction · French Literature

ISBN
9798893380750