Winter Flowers

It's October 1918 and the war is drawing to a close. Toussaint Caillet returns home to his wife, Jeanne, and the young daughter he hasn't seen growing up. He is not coming back from the front line but from the department for facial injuries at Val-de-Grâce military hospital, where he has spent the last two years. For Jeanne, who has struggled to endure his absence and the hardships of wartime, her husband's return marks the beginning of a new battle. With the promise of peace now in sight, the family must try to stitch together a new life from the tatters of what they had before.

Born in Paris in 1965, Angélique Villeneuve lived in Sweden and India before returning to her native France. The author of eight novels, she has also written numerous children's books. Les Fleurs d'hiver, which was published by Editions Phébus in 2014, won four literary prizes: the 2014 Prix Millepages, the 2015 Prix La Passerelle and Prix de la Ville de Rambouillet, and the 2016 Prix du Livre de Caractère de Quintin. Villeneuve's novel Maria, published by Grasset Editions in 2018, won the SGDL Grand Prix for fiction. Her most recent work, La Belle Lumière, a fictional account of the life of Helen Keller's mother, was published by Editions Le Passage in 2020.