PELICAN GIRLS
Praise for Pelican Girls:
“Stunning, moving and remarkable. Pelican Girls is more than a novel, it’s an act of advocacy for human rights and for historical acknowledgment. Julia Malye has found a rich and compelling voice, unique to those who are experts in navigating between languages and cultures.”
Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, internationally bestselling author of The Mountains Sing
“Pelican Girls is a marvelous achievement, an immersive and moving novel, as beautifully written as it is impeccably researched. I haven’t been this swept away by a piece of historical fiction since Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet.”
Jess Walter, bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins and The Cold Millions
“This book fascinates me. It’s moving in every way: a celebration of complicity and love among women and a summary of their difficult lives. It has everything in it: a great story, landscapes, atmosphere, depth and a finely wrought prose. It makes you feel that you are reading one of those literary classics that make you believe in contemporary fiction again–told with spark and excitement, and with the freshness only a young writer can give. ”
Pilar Quintana, two-time finalist of the National Book Award, author of The Bitch and Abyss
“To enter Julia Malye’s work is to be completely transported. Every detail in your vision, touch of fabric against your skin, pulse of blood through your veins, is rendered so lush and evocative that reading this novel feels like absorbing a lifetime of experience. The rare page-turner that both entertains and enlightens, Pelican Girls is an undeniable achievement of research, storytelling, and human compassion. One of the best historical novels you will ever come across; this book is an absolute gift.”
M.O. Walsh, NYT bestselling author of My Sunshine Away and The Big Door Prize
“A richly layered multi-character narrative of a long-overlooked period in history… Haunting, heartbreaking, and harrowing, Malye’s story is one of survival and perseverance; it is a look into the lives of women who’ve had everything taken from them, but still manage to go on.”
Virginia Reeves, author of Work Like Any Other and The Behavior of Love
“Pelican Girls is a feat of sublime imagination, every page a wonder. Malye has written an unforgettably rich and sensual novel—a triumph.”
Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Portable Veblen and The Dog of the North
“Julia Malye is a marvel: an inventive and powerful storyteller, an intrepid traveler both on and off the page, and a beautiful stylist in at least two languages. Pelican Girls is the realization of an extraordinary literary talent and I’m jealous of all of the readers who are about to discover her work for the first time.”
Nick Dybek, author of The Verdun Affair, Scribner
“Julia Malye is a writer of relentless talent and vibrant vision. In Pelican Girls, she has restored reality to a piece of history that needs to be remembered and created a book that will live in you a long time.”
Mark Mayer, author of Aerialists, Bloomsbury
“Julia Malye’s novel Pelican Girls is nothing less than astonishing. From its brilliant opening scenes in an 18th century French convent to the perils of an 18th century Atlantic crossing and life in the French colonies around New Orleans, it summons a world so lush and dangerous that you’ll feel you are there with this cast of young women—brought to America to be brides—whose courage and endurance will leave a deep impression in your heart. This breathtaking novel puts me in mind of Toni Morrison’s A Mercy for the way it brings to life a hidden chapter of early American history and conjures an indelible reality from history’s shadows, as the lives of these girls and women unfold and intertwine. Against the odds, they will carve out a community—and ultimately, wrest a fierce independence from a world designed to keep them captive. A tour de force.”
Marjorie Sandor, author of The Secret Music at Tordesillas, winner of a 2020 Foreword Indie Gold Medal for Historical Fiction
HarperCollins, 368 pages. Out March 5, 2024
A sweeping epic in the vein of Philipp Meyer’s The Son and Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko and inspired by a true story, this stunning US literary debut captures the never-before-told journey of the Baleine Brides: a ship full of young women plucked from a Paris asylum and sent to marry settlers in North America’s rough Louisiana Territory.
Paris, 1720. La Salpêtrière hospital is in crisis: too many occupants, not enough beds. Halfway across the world, France’s colony in the wilds of North America has space to spare and needs families to fill it. So the director of the hospital rounds up nearly a hundred female “volunteers” of childbearing age—orphans, prisoners, and mental patients—to be shipped to New Orleans.
Among this group are three unlikely friends: a sharp-tongued twelve-year old orphan, a mute ‘madwoman,’ and an accused abortionist.
Charlotte, Pétronille, and Geneviève, along with the dozens of other women aboard La Baleine, have no knowledge of what lies ahead and no control over their futures. Strangers brought together by fate, these brave and fierce young women will face extraordinary adversity—pirates, slavedrivers, sickness, war—but also the private trauma of heartbreak and unrequited love, children born and lost, cruelty and unexpected pleasure, and a friendship forged in fire that will sustain through the years.
At once a gorgeously written work of startling depth and emotion and a gripping drama marrying high-seas adventure with pioneer grit, Pelican Girls is a powerful, thought-provoking novel about female friendship and desire and the daunting compromises women are forced to make to survive.
Currently being translated in more than 20 languages.
You can pre-order Pelican Girls at your local independent bookstore, or from:
LA LOUISIANE
Éditions Stock, 558 pages. En librairie le 3 janvier 2024
Trois femmes.
Une terre impitoyable.
Une histoire oubliée depuis des siècles.
Paris, 1720. La Supérieure de la Salpêtrière est mandatée pour sélectionner une centaine de femmes “volontaires” qui seront envoyées en Louisiane afin d’y épouser les colons français.
Parmi elles, trois amies improbables : Charlotte, une orpheline de douze ans à la langue bien pendue ; Pétronille, une jeune aristocrate désargentée, rejetée par sa famille et Geneviève, une faiseuse d’anges. Comme leurs compagnes à bord de La Baleine, elles ignorent tout de ce qui les attend au-delà des mers.
Ces étrangères réunies par le destin devront braver l’adversité et traverser une vie faite de chagrins d’amour, de naissance et de deuils, de cruauté et de plaisir inattendus. Et d’une amitié forgée dans le feu.
En cours de traduction dans plus de vingt pays.
Vous pouvez précommander La Louisiane chez votre libraire préféré.e. ou sur :
LES FANTÔMES DE CHRISTOPHER D.
Éditions Fayard, 2016
“Un thriller éclaté version puzzle qui résonne avec l’actualité” Vanity Fair
La question est : jusqu’où iriez-vous pour laver votre honneur? Celui qui la pose s’appelle Christopher D., ancien officier du Los Angeles Police Department s’estimant victime de racisme et renvoyé pour des motifs qu’il qualifie de mensongers. Et la réponse est : tuer.
Les coupables, bien sûr, du moins ceux qu’il juge comme tels. Mais une fois pris dans l’engrenage de la vengeance, parviendra-t-il à épargner les innocents ?
À partir d’un fait divers, une fusillade à Big Bear, en Californie, en 2013, Julia Malye crée une incroyable mécanique romanesque qui dévoile minute par minute quels malheureux concours de circonstances amènent les victimes à se trouver au mauvais endroit au mauvais moment. Un compte à rebours angoissant qui fait surgir
de derrière l’apparente douceur de vivre californienne les ancestrales tensions raciales, la détresse sociale et cette tendance typiquement américaine à prétendre se faire justice soi-même.
THÉMOÉ
Éditions Balland, 2013
“Un style d’une élégance rare, tout en retenue” Madame Figaro
LA FIANCÉE DE TOCQUEVILLE
Éditions Balland, 2010
“Le résultat est étonnant de fraîcheur, de savoir-faire et d’efficacité, de quoi donner des complexes à quelques-uns de nos plus respectables auteurs de romans historiques.” Le Point
“Un très joli premier roman.” Elle
“Une plume classique et singulière.” VSD
