Virtue and Rosalind

byAnne Serre, Mark Hutchinson (Translator)

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Virtue and Rosalind is where our wildest dreams come true. That popular, but not very brilliant, author who’s winning all the prizes? Our writer-protagonist will bump her off. Uncle Henri who walked off during a family picnic and never came back? Rather than blame him, she admires his will to radically renounce the past for a woman in a red skirt, revisiting the picnic site like sacred ground.

But our heroine has more to accomplish on her present course, which glimmers at every turn with material for new characters, new novels. Central to this are her relationships with other women, who she regards as the finest and most meticulous lacemakers: absorbed in what they’re doing, creating something rather beautiful. They share her love of art – and of keeping an ample distance away from all the rest. After all, our darkest secrets live in the family.

International Booker shortlistee Anne Serre reaffirms herself a master of literary form and innovation. Reading her, we read a hundred books at once. At first we might not recognise ourselves in this dazzling hall of mirrors, but by the end of it, we know just who we are.

Betting on the Nobel Prize is a risky errand, but Serre feels like an increasingly decent bet . . . She does more in 100 words than most writers do in 10,000. This tale of a woman’s love of art and life marks another success
Best Books for 2026, The Telegraph

It is very rare for lightness to be a literary merit, for it not to rhyme with superficiality. But if we understand the word as Walter Benjamin does when he speaks of the heartbreaking, unshakable, inhuman ‘superficiality’ of Robert Walser’s characters returned from madness, we may come closer to the secret of Anne Serre’s writing. Her playful practice of literature is an art of detachment
Le Monde des livres

About Anne Serre

Anne Serre (b. 1960) is the author of eighteen works of fiction and a collection of notebooks. Her first novel, The Governesses, was published in 1992. Among her distinctions are a 2008 Cino del Duca Foundation award and the 2020 Prix Goncourt de la Nouvelle for her short-story collection Au coeur d’un été tout en or. In 2025, A Leopard-Skin Hat was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. Virtue and Rosalind, which was nominated for the Prix Médicis among many other prizes, is the fifth of her books to be published in English. Her work regularly appears in publications like Granta and The Paris Review.

Mark Hutchinson was born in London in 1957 and lives in Paris. Among his many translations from the French are René Char’s Hypnos: Notes from the French Resistance and The Inventors and Other Poems, and Emmanuel Hocquard's The Library at Trieste and The Gardens of Sallust.

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