Awards

• Winner of French Booksellers' award for Fiction Prix Wepler 2018

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9781999331887

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Reviews

'Nathalie Leger is a melancholy sentinel. From book to book she writes with a hunter's instinct, questioning the motives of women who, through their oeuvre, transform their lives into a mystery. In this fascinating account, she holds together the sacred and the profane. Dizzying.' - ELLE (France). 'More than just an exploration of a violent news story, The White Dress performs a subtle set of variations on the theme of remnants, of the ghosts that live within us.' -Le Monde des livres. 'The White Dress inspects the imaginary frontier between art and life.' - Liberation. 'Nathalie Leger's perceptive, challenging narratives establish dialogues between different women, different countries, different times. She compellingly demonstrates the propagation of emotions from one existence to another. Using symmetries and similarities, she calls attention to some of life's big questions: the relationships between the internal and the external, the singular and the collective, the self and the other.' - Le Journal du dimanche. 'If art imitates life, then life, in Nathalie Leger's world, imitates life: all our words, our thoughts, our actions are imbued with the memory of the actions, thoughts, and words of others. And isn't that the point literature: to voice all those lives that we carry unconsciously, to tell all those fictions that - paradoxically - make us up?' -Le Monde des livres. 'No pathos in these pages; Nathalie Leger seeks women's private truths under their symbolic dresses.' -ELLE (France)

'The White Dress shows Leger doing something new. Her melodious intertwining of another's story with her own recalls her other works, but this is an altogether darker, altogether more unashamedly melancholic exploration of narrative (...) the narrator of The White Dress is no longer so tentative. For Leger's message seems to be that to immerse oneself in other people's stories, whether out of pity or simple escapism, is only to find a projection of one's own life.' Charlie Stone, The Arts Desk. 'More than just an exploration of a violent news story, The White Dress performs a subtle set of variations on the theme of remnants, of the ghosts that live within us.' Le Monde des livres. 'The White Dress inspects the imaginary frontier between art and life.' - Liberation.''Nathalie Leger is a melancholy sentinel. From book to book she writes with a hunter's instinct, questioning the motives of women who, through their oeuvre, transform their lives into a mystery. In this fascinating account, she holds together the sacred and the profane. Dizzying.' - ELLE (France). 'Nathalie Leger's perceptive, challenging narratives establish dialogues between different women, different countries, different times. She compellingly demonstrates the propagation of emotions from one existence to another. Using symmetries and similarities, she calls attention to some of life's big questions: the relationships between the internal and the external, the singular and the collective, the self and the other.' - Le Journal du dimanche. 'If art imitates life, then life, in Nathalie Leger's world, imitates life: all our words, our thoughts, our actions are imbued with the memory of the actions, thoughts, and words of others. And isn't that the point literature: to voice all those lives that we carry unconsciously, to tell all those fictions that - paradoxically - make us up?' -Le Monde des livres. 'No pathos in these pages; Nathalie Leger seeks women's private truths under their symbolic dresses.' -ELLE (France)

'The White Dress shows Leger doing something new. Her melodious intertwining of another's story with her own recalls her other works, but this is an altogether darker, altogether more unashamedly melancholic exploration of narrative (...) the narrator of The White Dress is no longer so tentative. For Leger's message seems to be that to immerse oneself in other people's stories, whether out of pity or simple escapism, is only to find a projection of one's own life.' Charlie Stone, The Arts Desk. 'More than just an exploration of a violent news story, The White Dress performs a subtle set of variations on the theme of remnants, of the ghosts that live within us.' Le Monde des livres. 'The White Dress inspects the imaginary frontier between art and life.' - Liberation.''Nathalie Leger is a melancholy sentinel. From book to book she writes with a hunter's instinct, questioning the motives of women who, through their oeuvre, transform their lives into a mystery. In this fascinating account, she holds together the sacred and the profane. Dizzying.' - ELLE (France). 'Nathalie Leger's perceptive, challenging narratives establish dialogues between different women, different countries, different times. She compellingly demonstrates the propagation of emotions from one existence to another. Using symmetries and similarities, she calls attention to some of life's big questions: the relationships between the internal and the external, the singular and the collective, the self and the other.' - Le Journal du dimanche. 'If art imitates life, then life, in Nathalie Leger's world, imitates life: all our words, our thoughts, our actions are imbued with the memory of the actions, thoughts, and words of others. And isn't that the point literature: to voice all those lives that we carry unconsciously, to tell all those fictions that - paradoxically - make us up?' -Le Monde des livres. 'No pathos in these pages; Nathalie Leger seeks women's private truths under their symbolic dresses.' -ELLE (France) 'I've just re-read Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Leger, translated by Cecile Menon and Natasha Lehrer, as well as the two forthcoming books that form a trilogy with that one: The White Dress, also translated by Lehrer, and Exposition, translated by Amanda Demarco. All three defy categorisation - history, essay, memoir, fiction. I admire the wholeness and agility of these works very much.' (Catherine Lacey, iNews) 'it's interesting to note the complex, often unlikeable nature of Leger's characters: the author's own self-interrogations have drawn her to those who, like her mother, like Leger herself, are not strong, straightforward, feminist heroes. Instead, they are women who, resolved as they are to eschew the determining nature of the male gaze, to reject their traditional exhibitionist role, continue to struggle with their own sense of being.' - Rachel Andrews, The Stinging Fly. 'In each text, Leger's writing is borne from the women themselves: their lives provide material for new obsessions, and through their work and their working practices, she is led down many paths... Each woman is not a simply a singular life, but a library to be read, a house to explore, a plant to grow.' - The White Review 'Leger's writing is concerned with the value of its own creation, of its possibility to respond to what she terms elsewhere the 'annihilation' of narrative through male violence. This writing is made through doubt about its own capacities, and its own efficacies. But I think there is a benefit to faltering at the possibilities of expression.' -The White Review 'The third book in Leger's uncategorizable triptych turns its lens onto Italian performance artist Pippa Bacca, who was tragically murdered while hiking across Europe in a wedding dress to promote world peace. This harrowing story, told in Leger's agile, exploratory, and gorgeously labyrinthine prose, raises questions about womanhood, justice, and what it means to make art in the world. To be consumed in one sitting and mulled over forever.' -Halley Parry, bookseller; Skylight Books

Author Information

Nathalie Leger is the award-winning author of Suite for Barbara Loden and Exposition, short experimental novels based on her research work as a curator and archivist. Her UK debut Suite for Barbara Loden (2015) garnered intense critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, and was translated into several European languages. It is credited as being instrumental to the re-release, in American film theatres, of actress and director Barbara Loden's cult cinema-verite masterpiece Wanda (1970). She has curated exhibitions on Roland Barthes and Samuel Beckett for the Centre Pompidou, and is Director of the Institut Memoires de l'Edition Contemporaine, an organization dedicated to preserving the archives of modern French writers.

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