Longings and Belongings is a collection of twenty-four essays published by Nancy Huston, in English or French or both, over the past two decades (1981-2002). They can be seen as milestones on her path as novelist and expatriate, mother and intellectual, dreamer and realist, body and soul. In these non-fiction pieces, Huston discusses a number of authors who have inspired or infuriated her over the years: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Milan Kundera, Sylvia Plath, Simone Weil, and especially Romain Gary. Though the essays cover a wide-ranging number of topics — motherhood, eroticism, war, madness, exile, the search for identity, the transgression of taboo, the moral implications of creation — they all revolve in one way or another around a single theme: the mind-body problem.

Nancy Huston’s books have won the Prix Goncourt des Lyceéns, the Prix Elle (Quebec) and the Governor General’s Award. Her novel, The Mark of the Angel, was an international bestseller, which won the Grand Prix des Lectrices de Elle, the Canadian Jewish Fiction Book Award, the Torgi Award and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. Fault Lines won the Prix Femina in 2006. Nancy Huston lives in Paris with her husband, the writer Tzvetan Todorov, and their two children.

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