Louise Aubert leaves Mathieu Lord when he joins the Stalinist party. Fifteen years later, she writes a letter in which she dares express her vision of their common history, marked by authoritarianism, mental cruelty and the absence of sharing in the name of love. In the story that follows this letter, Louise recalls each sequence of her break with Mathieu and exposes the duplicity of the intellectual avant-garde. She also describes how she re-entered society freed from censorship and how she finds the inner strength to speak the truth. La Femme du stalinien is the final novel of a trilogy that includes L'Homme qui peignait Staline [1989] and Les Apparatchiks vont à la mer Noire [2004].

France Théoret holds a doctorate in French Studies from the University of Sherbrooke. After nineteen years of teaching, she quit to devote herself full-time to writing. Laurence, translated for The Mercury Press by Gail Scott, is Théoret’s eleventh book; previous titles include The Man Who Painted Stalin, Nous parlerons comme on écrit, Nécessairement putain, and Entre raison et déraison.

France Théoret's profile page

• Short-listed, Governor General's Award for Translation